Subject: PMP> Re: IPP> MIME-types and alignment

From: Harry Lewis <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 1997 19:20:32 -0400

Larry, you inquired...

>However, I would like to inquire if there are clients of printer MIBs
>that use the enum list of printer interpreters for anything other
>than displaying to the user of a system monitoring device for
>informational display, i.e., whether the protocol use within printer
>MIB could be replaced with a comment string without affecting the
>operational stability of any application.

Printer discovery may be coupled with programmatic use of the Interpreter
table to facilitate selection of the correct driver in a printing system.

Also, there are disadvantages to MIME for memory constrained systems
(typical devices or end-nodes). An integer representation is much more
concise and alleviates storing translations. Granted, most PDL names
are not likely to require translation but I'm not entirely certain for
all of them (use "PAGES" as an example").

Harry Lewis

---

From: Larry Masinter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Aug 1997 04:39:54 PDT

I asked:

> I would like to inquire if there are clients of printer MIBs
> >informational display

and you answered with a hypothetical ("may be") rather than an actual
("is, in the following product"):

> Printer discovery may be coupled with programmatic use of the
> Interpreter table to facilitate selection of the correct driver
in a printing system.

I understand clearly how it could be used, what I'm asking is whether
it *is* used. Isn't it a misuse of SNMP to use it for discovery. Are
there systems that actually use the Printer MIB, rather than some kind
of directory service, for device discovery?

> (typical devices or end-nodes). An integer representation is much
> more concise and alleviates storing translations.

I find this incredible: an end-node has enough memory to hold the
4 bytes for an integer enumeration, but not enough to hold
the string "application/postscript"? I don't know what you mean
by 'storing translations'. MIME types are protocol elements, and
not user strings.

> Granted, most PDL names are not likely to require translation
> but I'm not entirely certain for all of them (use "PAGES" as
> an example").

MIME types are not "PDL names". They are registered strings instead
of registered entities.

The issue is not the advantage of form, the issue is that we need
a single registry of media types, so that we don't have to coordinate
parallel registries or deal with the consequences of not doing so.

Larry