Re: URIs in QR

hello.

>> http://www.flickr.com/photos/dret/4498124087/
> Cute.  Worked fine using my android phone aimed at my laptop screen.  I
> suppose now I'll be needing a desktop app (maybe part of the screenshot
> system) that recognizes QR codes in photos and videos displayed on my
> desktop.   :-)

my prediction and hope is that QR support will actually become standard 
in mobile platforms, so that data input via QR is supported by the 
platform itself. for this to become a reality, there should be stable 
and well-defined ways about what to expect and how to process it, and 
currently that is not really the case outside of vendor-specific 
environments.

> I don't personally know anything about QR codes, and this is the first
> I've heard of a need for standardization, but as a W3C staff member, my
> ears perked up there.  Yes, this looks like it might well be a good fit
> for W3C.  It could be an incubator, like you suggest, or, if it's pretty
> clear what a solution looks like, it could be a Submission and then a
> Working Group.

i'd go for a 1 year incubator and then take it from there. this year 
could be spent with just collecting information about conventions and 
implementations and coming up with recommendations about how to best act 
in this existing environment. if there's interest, that could lead to a 
more active role by coming up with new conventions or standards, 
whatever might be the most appropriate way to proceed.

personally, i'd love to see the W3C take on a more strategic role in a 
variety of areas, and the mobile web certainly is one of them. while 
premature standardization might be a risky route to take, recognizing an 
area and fostering cooperation in that area might be a very useful and 
important first step to take.

> Again, I don't know anything about QR codes, but I'm a bit surprised the
> folks who defined them haven't tackled this problem.  Perhaps this needs
> a new mix of URI and QR expertise.

ntt docomo has done a lot of work in this area but mostly for their own 
ecosystem, and a lot of that if not very well documented and probably 
not even all that well-defined (maybe it is, but definitely not in an 
open way that you can easily find). while japanese carriers have been 
busy designing and building valuable services for a mobile ecosystem, 
european and american carriers have mostly been busy trying to extract 
as much money out of their customers by coming up with a countless 
number of new "plans", and they still haven't caught on to the idea that 
by allowing people to do more things with their phones, the mobile 
ecosystem will grow very naturally, and so will their profits.

as yet another tangent: facebook recently started experimenting with QR, 
and of course all facebook QRs point to facebook profile pages. so i 
think we are at the brink of seeing much more QR usage, and trying to 
help developers to better navigate that new landscape could be a very 
useful thing to do. google sent out a bunch of QR stickers to many 
businesses which of course pointed to google landing pages (and then 
apparently filtered access to that URI by browser type as reported on 
http://wapreview.com/blog/?p=5834, but that seems to be fixed now), so 
we do see very relevant companies recognizing the value of producing 
real-world entry points into the web.

cheers,

erik wilde   tel:+1-510-6432253 - fax:+1-510-6425814
        dret@berkeley.edu  -  http://dret.net/netdret
        UC Berkeley - School of Information (ISchool)

Received on Thursday, 8 April 2010 18:20:58 UTC