[tpurves]

Semi related. When I worked at Visa, I developed some ideas around making QR codes slightly more resilient to malicious hijacking when used in the context of a payments or commerce usecase. The idea was for the scanning app to look not just for a QR but also look for adjacent payment acceptance marks (e.g. branded Visa, MC, PayPal, or a merchant's brandmark etc.) and then dynamically only resolve URLs to registered domains associate with those marks. The idea was that QR codes not human readable, and URLs are a lot to ask the average person to reliable parse. So instead, have the scanner also see and understand the same contextual cues that the human can see and understand. And for the human, give them the confidence to scan QRs that will take them to a domain they would expect, and not to a Rick Astley video or worse.

[r0s]

I was recently discussing this subject and I have to wonder if some combination of human readable symbols that is also optimized for machine scanning will emerge.

Right now any phone should be able to parse a url if it can read the type, and so what is the point of QR besides the ubiquity?

[pants2]

QR codes provide built-in error correction so will stand up to serious wear-and-tear, partially obscured images, etc. - and it won't confuse O with 0 and i with l

[r0s]

All that is true of regular type as well to some degree, I guess my point is a standard of readable url type could have all those qualities.

Also the longer a url is out in physical space the more danger of it being replaced online, longevity may not be desirable.

[tpurves]

You are raising all the right points. QR code standards come from an era when cheap digital cameras sensors were MUCH less good than they are now, and similarly when OCR/image-recognition resources were much less cheaply available or built-in to mobile devices.