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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?

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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

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.

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.

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