mark nottingham

Surfing the Barcoded Web

Saturday, 16 September 2006

Apple’s shipping an iSight camera in just about everything these days, and one of the coolest apps to use it is Delicious Library. If you follow that to its logical conclusion, everything should be barcode-enabled, by Web-enabling it.

For example, if you go to a wine site and scan a bottle that’s sitting on your shelf, Safari should be smart enough to automatically navigate to a page with details for that bottle (e.g., a map of where it was produced, its winery, tasting notes, and similar wines).

How? Well, there’s already a free library that does the heavy lifting, all that’s needed is a bit of glue into Safari (or Firefox, for that matter) and a standard way for Web sites to advertise themselves as barcode-savvy.

One possibility would be to use a microformat on forms; e.g.,

<form action="winefinder" method="GET">
  <input type="text" name="winery"/>
  <input type="text" name="upc-code" class="barcode-scannable"/>
  <input type="submit"/>
</form>

That would work in some situations, but for others, it would require an explicit barcode form field (which is useless for most users) and an explicit press of the “submit” button. A reasonable alternative might be a link template; e.g., in the HTML’s head, we might find:

<link rel="barcode" href-template="http://wine.example.com/upc/{barcode}"/>

so that a barcode-enabled browser would be able to automatically navigate from a page when a barcode was input.

Anybody at Apple listening?

P.S. It’s not that barcodes are really special, beyond the fact that they’re so ubiquitous; they’re sort of the URIs of the physical world.