Re: [Cbor] CBOR in QRcodes

[Christian Amsüss <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Jun 22, 2021 at 12:16:16PM -0400, Michael Richardson wrote:
> Thus my surprise at needing to encode CBOR in BASE-45.
> I wouldn't have thought that necessary, that one could go directly to binary.
> I imagine that the issue is one of what are the existing scanning equipment
> out there, in airports, customs booths, etc. Many of them pretend to be
> keyboards, and many of the systems they are connected to expect alphanumeric
> inputs into a form field (whether an HTML form, or a 3270 terminal).

Have you had any success with binary data on end user QR code readers?

To my understanding, the limitation is in what can be used with generic
cell-phone based QR code scanners. These, according to what I gathered
from around the base45 spec, seem to sometimes[citation needed] reject
binary data that is not UTF-8. The dispatch into apps of the OS appears
to be focused around interpreting the QR code values as URIs and then
registering prefixes (which may not be registered schemes but look like
them, or may be schemes including host names) for an installed app (or
even to go into the app store).

For example (just picking a random tutorial I found), [1] implies that a
snippet like

<intent-filter>
  <!-- ... -->
  <data android:host="example.com" android:scheme="httpsz" />
</intent-filter>

is used to make a particular class of QR codes open in a to-be-designed
app. Whether or not that is good use of URIs, or whether the schemes
used there are registered, is unfortunately secondary (given the
deployment base of The Two Operating Systems, and the user expectation
to point their OS's camera to the code and go). Practically, that
requires the QR codes to conform to (someone's view of) URI syntax.

To avoid wasting too much of the QR code's encoding space, given
that encoding a URI in ASCII alredy wastes >1bit/byte, and that one
available encoding provides 45 (largely URI-safe) symbols in an
efficient encoding, base45 (or some enhanced version thereof) does
appear useful.

BR
c

[1]: https://techpearl.com/blog/qr-code/index.html

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