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by Kilimanjaro 4902 days ago
Tell me how you enter a QR code on a touch screen. At least the url you can enter, QR code fails, as your argument 'entering them on a touch screen is harder'.

That problem is pertinent to both, so QR codes are still worse than urls.

Your argument is invalid.

Now, if you mean reading the QR code or URL on any device, let me tell you that QR codes are dots, if you misread a dot you fuck up the meaning. So OCR engines can EASILY read a URL and the same rule applies, if they miss a dot, they may confuse an I for an L or a 1, but still easier than a QR code, because 26 letters an 10 numbers are easier to configure in an OCR engine than irregular dots on a square.

URLs win.

I rest my case, your honor.

1 comments

s/touchscreen/touchscreen device/. Even iPods have cameras now.

OCR has been failing us really badly for 40 years now, and not for a lack of trying. In fact, OCR is so bad that the one way we use to distinguish humans from machine is by forcing them to do OCR.

QR codes were designed with targeting/aligning areas as well as tons of redundancy built in, there's a reason why they can be easily scanned in realtime from a video feed at an odd skewed angle in the dark, whereas OCR doesn't even work properly on books scanned on a flat scanner.

OCR has always sucked and will always suck. Sorry.