IPP began as a proposal by Novell for the creation of an Internet printing protocol project in 1996. The result was a draft written by Novell and Xerox called the Lightweight Document Printing Application (LDPA), derived from ECMA-140: Document Printing Application (DPA). At about the same time, Lexmark publicly proposed something called the HyperText Printing Protocol (HTPP), and both HP and Microsoft had started work on new print services for what became Windows 2000. 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). The BOF session in December 1996 showed sufficient interest in developing a printing protocol, leading to the creation of the IETF Internet Printing Protocol (ipp) working group, which concluded in 2005.