[2] IPP began as a proposal by Novell for the creation of an Internet printing protocol project in 1996.
Each of the companies chose to start a common Internet Printing Protocol project in the Printer Working Group (PWG) and negotiated an IPP birds-of-a-feather (or BOF) session with the Application Area Directors in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
Work on IPP continues in the PWG Internet Printing Protocol workgroup with the publication of 23 candidate standards, 1 new and 3 updated IETF RFCs, and several registration and best practice documents providing extensions to IPP and support for different services including 3D Printing, scanning, facsimile, cloud-based services, and overall system and resource management.
A subsequent Candidate Standard replaced it in 2011 defining an additional 2.2 version for production printers (PWG 5100.12-2011,[19]).
IPP Everywhere was published in 2013 and provides a common baseline for printers to support so-called "driverless" printing from client devices.
It builds on IPP and specifies additional rules for interoperability, such as a list of document formats printers need to support.
Products using the Internet Printing Protocol include Universal Print from Microsoft,[23] CUPS (which is part of Apple macOS and many BSD and Linux distributions and is the reference implementation for most versions of IPP [24]), Novell iPrint, and Microsoft Windows versions starting from MS Windows 2000.