On technical limitations of QR Codes

[MeixDev]

Seems to be the right place for this discussion, as the core will be one tasked with both creating the URL and recovering them (And maybe creating the QR Codes ? That may end up in the mobile app or the common UI).

But nonetheless, it should be aware of our limitations.

Objective

• We want to be able to create Business Cards from the mobile app, then share them between users as QR Codes (and maybe through others means, but the QR Code part is immutable).
• We want to stay serverless, which means URL Shorteners are currently out of the equation. There are some open-sources implementations here and there (Or we could even create our own for style points!), but it would require a back-end. We technically still could stay "mostly serverless" by implementing URL Shortening through a service such as Firebase, though.

This leads to an interesting problem : The limits or the URL size.

The limits

URLs are technically limited to 2048 characters. While there's no clear convention about it apparently, above this size, older browsers such as Internet Explorer won't be able to parse it. And I'm not even sure current ones wouldn't push you away too.

But that isn't even our worst problem : QR Codes are.

See the following two QR Codes:

The first one is currently unreadabable when rendered with a size within the limits of a modern-sized smartphone. The second one is readable, although it isn't super easily read.

The main problems here are the size : The first one contains 512 characters, the second one only 256.

We probably could up that number a bit by trying more precise sizes between the two, but it will hinder the ability to read the QR Code without super precision.

Which leads to our current design problem:

Should we take 256 characters as our current "upper limit" ?