Subject: IPP>MOD - your comments on conformance

From: Roger K Debry <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 1997 10:27:23 -0400

Classification:
Prologue:
Epilogue: Roger K deBry
Senior Techncial Staff Member
Architecture and Technology
IBM Printing Systems
email: [email-masked]
phone: 1-303-924-4080

Bob, thank you for your comments. I agree with most of them and will
work them into the conformance text. However, one area that I feel
very uncomfortable with is the current discussion going on in the model
group on supportedXXX and defaultXXX.  This whole discussion seems
overly complicated to me.

What is wrong with simply using the convention that the first attribute
value returned is the default. For example, if the Printer implements
the Sides attribute and supports the values 1-sided and 2-sided-long-
edge, and 1-sided is the default, then in response to a query on
sides the response would be

sides: 1-sided, 2-sided-long-edge.

On the other hand, if 2-sided-long-edge were the default, then the
response would be

sides: 2-sided-long-edge, 1-sided.

Seems simple, straightforward to me.

---

From: [email-masked] (Robert Herriot)
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 1997 11:34:17 -0700

There are two reasons that the default needs to separate.

  1. There may be a reason for the ordering of values and the default
     may not be the first.  For example with sides, I would want
     the ordering to be one-sided, two-sided-long-edge, two-sided-short-edge
     for all printers supporting these three values (under the assumption
     that a GUI would probably present then in the order received), but the
     default would vary from printer to printer.

  2. The rule of "first" works for key-words, but not for integers, dates
     or any type of value whose values are expressed by a range rather
     than by an enumeration. Of course, the default in this case could
     be the first (i.e. lowest) value in the range, and I suggest this
     in the rules that I proposed. But it isn't possible to rearrange a
     range to make some other number appear to be first.

So, as my rules suggested. The rule of "first" is fine as a default if
the printer does not explicitly specify a default. But I think that
it is normally better to have an explicit default.

Bob Herriot

> From [email-masked] Wed Apr 23 07:26:56 1997
> From: Roger K Debry <[email-masked]>
> To: <[email-masked]>, <bob.herriot@Eng>
> Subject: IPP>MOD - your comments on conformance
> Date: Wed, 23 Apr 1997 10:27:23 -0400
> Mime-Version: 1.0
> Sender: [email-masked]
> X-Lines: 29
> 
> Classification:
> Prologue:
> Epilogue: Roger K deBry