15 comments

[ 23.3 ms ] story [ 233 ms ] thread
It doesn’t seem to like spaces that much, the code for [QR coded] is broken for me on safari ios. When the space is removed it’s a working qrcode again
Spaces are definitely broken in Safari.
Maybe it's not practical for day-to-day use but the way this hacks the font to produce something completely different is amazing!
Font rendering should scare you
Indeed, I have all font downloads off in all my browsers, by default.
Unfortunately the most important thing here is missing - the whole explanation, like how did we get there, what those fonts can do and so on..
Great idea, but it's a shame that it only supports Basic Latin (English-only).
A fun benefit seems to be that you can select the QR code as text and copy it, which puts the original text in your clipboard.
This ... means the page could render a QR code for humans while letting bots see the actual URL. That is incredibly cool.
Or with some tweaks to the font code they could see a different URL…

This could be used for good (diverting bots away from where you don't want them) or evil (different destinations for user and other readers of the page could be used to trick people going to undesirable locations, because the apparent URL checks out find according to automated scanners).

Conventional web technologies already can handle this kind of use case, either by wrapping an image in a link tag, or using an alt= value.
I think qr code is more readable by bots than humans and I would prefer to see actual url...
This is SO COOL. Works perfectly in FF for me, if it can be made to work in safari then this might be one of the easiest ways to generate and display QR codes on the front-end.