- From: Dan Brickley <danbri@danbri.org>
- Date: Thu, 8 Apr 2010 17:15:07 +0200
- To: Bob Aman <bobaman@google.com>
- Cc: uri@w3.org
(thanks to Gannon and Erik too for replies) On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 5:03 PM, Bob Aman <bobaman@google.com> wrote: >> Context for this enquiry is an investigation into the use of >> mechanisms like QR Codes > > Something of a tangent: > > I hesitate to suggest this, since I hate URL shorteners, but in the > context of QR codes, they don't seem too bad. In my experience, > camera phones have much better success rates reading QR codes > containing smaller payloads, and I think that outweighs the > disadvantage of URL shorteners. Plus I'm sure many of the people > using QR codes to transmit links are going to be interested in the > analytics that URL shorteners can provide since there won't exactly be > a referrer. Yes, well if not using tinyurl.com or bit.ly.com, I think quite likely that people encoding URIs in QR Codes will have a strong incentive to keep them short. Most likely uses are for homepages, blogs, of people and businesses, or lookups into databases (books, inventory etc). I expect same likely to be true of audio encodings. So rather than have a hard cut-off, just let the quality tail off naturally so that above-average lengths are possible just less reliable, and that short URIs are rewarded. My specific interest is in stuffing links like xmpp:bob.notube@gmail.com into machine-detectable form, eg. on a TV screen. In testing with a 3G iPhone (ie. before they improved the lens and focussing, I'm told) I get reasonable performance, although not great. Examples for the curious: http://www.flickr.com/photos/danbri/4358715185/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/danbri/4360377558/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/danbri/4401213326/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/danbri/4382103516/ (as you can see, I'm happily sacrificing data reliability for prettyness, by including needless eye candy in the codes using http://lapin-bleu.net/riviera/?p=138 and the audio codec stuff has similar aesthetic biases...). ...in this particular scenario, a media centre box is passing it's Jabber/XMPP URI to a nearby smartphone. We had a little discussion on the XMPP-social list about whether passing a certificate fingerprint in the link might also be possible, but that's perhaps a bit ambitious. To know really what makes sense I want to run some tests on different cameras and displays, but also to gather some more general info about typical URI lengths. cheers, Dan
Received on Thursday, 8 April 2010 15:15:41 UTC