Thank you for your responses! W3C seems like the organization pertaining a lot to this subject. Some W3C standards aren't limited to the Internet as well. I found epub as an open standard alternative to pdf, woff (standards track font format), a proposal for SVG fonts. XSL for a style sheet or something XML based like that would be good for printer border information. A lot of this could be used in a PDL. IPP for printing is also over the an Internet protocol. Some printers are even meant to work on LANs or an Intranet, which does mean it can be a topic for W3C. Ghostscript, PPD and Guten print are opensource solutions on the software end, but they are centric around a proprietary PDL on the hardware end. XML would be preferred as a standard over Javascript. It would be nice if there were an opensource standard, which there's compatibility of any printer on that end that uses that standard. PDF which has an ISO standard is still also centric around Postscript. Archival formats for standards are always an interest. > Phillip Hallam-Baker > This sounds like a possibly useful piece of work but not really in IETF > remit. W3C has the SVG experience, compression experience, etc. > As a practical matter, this use case seems to be adequately served by > proprietary standards that have become so widely used as to be ubiquitous. > The big irritation I have with printer drivers is that they live in the > wrong damn place. Printer drivers should not require system privileges to > install. The application running on my local machine should be able to > discover the available printers, select one and negotiate an interchange > format with the printers. > Some of that is in IETF space (via Bonjour). But there doesn't seem to be > interest in the platform provider and printer provider world to make it > completely seamless yet. > Larry Masinter > RFC 8118. There are numerous implementations, many open source. Ghostscript, PDF.js for example. > What the IETF needs now, however, is a standard for “Archival SVG” that is, to SVG, what PDF/A is to PDF.
