RFC 2534 list of ua-media and paper-size values

"Larry Masinter" <[email protected]> Thu, 14 Oct 1999 19:25:32 PDT
Newsgroups gmane.ietf.medfree
Message-ID <[email protected]>
HTML 4.0 (http://www.w3.org/TR/html40) contains a list of devices
("media") that is used for selection of style sheets. This list
of devices includes:

screen 	Intended for non-paged computer screens. 
tty 	       Intended for media using a fixed-pitch character grid,
              such as teletypes, terminals, or portable devices with
              limited display capabilities. 
tv            Intended for television-type devices (low resolution, color,
              limited scrollability). 
projection    Intended for projectors. 
handheld      Intended for handheld devices (small screen, monochrome,
              bitmapped graphics, limited bandwidth). 
print         Intended for paged, opaque material and for documents viewed
              on screen in print preview mode. 
braille       Intended for braille tactile feedback devices. 
aural         Intended for speech synthesizers. 
all           Suitable for all devices. 

which seems to overlap the various conceptual spaces of CONNEG
media featuresincluding RFC 2534's ua-media:

     screen           A refreshable display
     screen-paged     a refreshable display which cannot scroll
     stationery       Separately cut sheets of an opaque material
     transparency     Separately cut sheets of a transparent material
     envelope         Envelopes that can be used for conventional
                      mailing purposes
     envelope-plain   Envelopes that are not preprinted and have no
                      windows
     continuous       Continuously connected sheets of an opaque
                      material

I would guess that HTML 4.0 "print" == CONNEG "ua-media=stationery"
+ some kind of range (unspecified) of resolution & pix-x & pix-y.

HTML has no notion of "transparency" or "screen-paged" (except
maybe in combination with low resolution of "tv"), while CONNEG
has no value for "braille" or "aural".

IPP (RFC 2566) in Appendix C has a different set of "media", where
"media" includes size, and whether or not the paper is colored, etc.
It's a pretty lengthy list, so I won't reproduce it here.

Anyway, I think we might want to take another look at the list
of media values and update it, possibly providing for some other
mechanism for registering new values.

I'm convinced that the approach taken by conneg of handling
sizes separately from the nature of the medium is correct, but
that we might want to revisit the list of paper sizes & media
types to align IPP and CONNEG and HTML, possibly recycling
updating RFC 2534.

Part of this would be so that IPP might consider using 
CONNEG feature sets to talk about both capability and availability,
and that HTML and CCPP might use the same vocabulary.

Larry