One thing that really annoys me with the use of qr codes (which are more often used due to the pandemic) is that many qr codes don't include the quiet zone required to scan the code. Instead they expect that the app the code is displayed in has a white background. But this doesn't work if you get a qr code via email and have dark mode active. In the first year of the pandemic I often had to fiddle with my mail app because of it, now I just have my app set to light mode. Generate correct QR codes, people!
Well, the very concept of the quiet zone is rather unworkable for mass uses. QR code in particular has a relatively large quiet zone (8/29 = ~28% at the smallest size) in spite of also having multiple large finder patterns. If QR code can't function without that large quiet zone, I think it should have extended timing patterns so that the "quiet" zone actually has some pixels (modules in the QR terminology) set so users are expected not to cut the corner. A similar strategy has been used by EAN-13 where the quiet zone is indicated with a placeholder character `>` underneath.
You’re even understating the impact of the quiet zone: at version 1, the QR code itself is only 52% of the code + quiet zone area (21**2 modules out of 29**2). Almost twice as bad! :)
Ah, yes, it is even worse when you compare areas. I think the quiet zone is a recommendation and not a strict requirement, so being able to reduce or share the quiet zone is not very surprising. I'm more curious that the valid QR code is bounded with finder patterns so the quiet zone doesn't seem necessary (those patterns are optimized for linear scanning by maintaining 1:1:3:1:1 black-white-b-w-b ratios across all axes, so you don't need any additional quiet zone in principle).
In practice, I find that the popular ZXing can scan QR Codes very reliably with a 1-module quiet zone, even though the standard requires 4 modules. That said, 0 modules is universally a bad idea; putting a black border immediately around a QR Code is a recipe for failure.
I mostly agree, but we can't easily change the fact that people are using two-dimensional barcodes for transferring a small amount of information anyway.
