Changelog

What has actually changed on this site, newest first. Corrections to published content are listed here as well as fixes, because a correction you cannot see is not much of a correction.

2026-08-30 — 한국어판 (Korean)

• New: the site is now published in Korean at /ko/. It is a smaller site than the English one on purpose — the home page, the QR code hub, and the QR, URL and Wi-Fi generators, written in Korean rather than machine-translated — and it grows a page at a time. Pages that have no Korean version simply do not exist under /ko/, so nothing thin was published to fill a language.
• New: reciprocal hreflang annotations with x-default on English, matching alternates in the sitemap, and a language link on every page that has a counterpart. Automated tests fail the build on a one-way alternate, a page annotated in a language it is not written in, or an alternate pointing at a URL that was never built.
• Changed: the navigation, footer, search and the generator interface are translated, not just the page copy — so the Korean pages are usable in Korean, not merely readable.
• Fixed: the QR generator declared its English FAQ in structured data while rendering a different one, which would have told search engines something the page did not say.

2026-08-29 — Canonical host, header layout, search and accessibility

• Fixed: www.qrbarcodetools.net served the entire site with a 200 and an index, follow robots tag while every canonical pointed at the apex, so the site was reachable on two hostnames at once. www now redirects to https://qrbarcodetools.net in a single hop, keeping the path and query string.
• Fixed: the header was wider than its container, so between roughly 1361 px and 1400 px the page scrolled sideways and the "Create QR code" button was cut off. The header now has its own track, Bulk and Print share one menu, and the layout is checked automatically at twelve widths in both themes.
• Fixed: the QR code generator showed a red required-field error on the URL box before anyone had typed anything. Errors now appear when you have edited a field and left it, or when you ask for output — and the disabled Download, Copy, Print and Verify buttons now say why they are off.
• Fixed: two buttons on the QR generator carried the hidden attribute but were on screen anyway, because a component display rule beat it. One of them was an empty button with no accessible name.
• Fixed: a verification result could be wiped a fraction of a second after it appeared, if a pending redraw landed after the decode finished. The result is now cleared only when the code itself changes.
• Fixed: the label maker injected its print stylesheet into the page, which turned the whole page white in dark mode and left the label captions unreadable.
• Changed: search is now one module behind every box — header, drawer, homepage hero and category filter. Submitting filters the tool list, states how many matched, offers the closest matches when nothing does, and puts the query in the URL so Back and Reload restore it.
• Changed: the homepage leads with three actions and the live generator instead of burying them below sixty-three tool cards.
• Changed: navigation group names are no longer <h3> elements, so a screen reader's heading list starts with the page's own <h1> rather than a dozen menu labels. The mobile drawer is built when it is first opened rather than duplicating every link in the HTML.
• Changed: four category accent colours were darkened to clear 4.5:1, links inside running text are underlined, and wide comparison tables scroll inside their own container instead of pushing a phone screen sideways.
• Changed: the Bulk, Print and Scanning hubs gained real comparison and decision content instead of being three short pages, and Methodology now lists library versions and licences, publishes the check-digit test vectors we test against, and records what was tested and when.
• Changed: a distinct social preview image per section, and the retired sitelinks SearchAction removed from the homepage structured data.

2026-08-12 — Content and indexing overhaul

• New: this changelog, an editorial policy, and a real guides index. Previously the "Guides" link in the header and breadcrumb pointed at one specific article, which was doing duty as the section index for the other seventeen.
• Fixed: every guide used to end with a card for all 17 other guides — up to 54% of the page on the shortest ones, and identical across all 18. Replaced with the tools that guide is about, plus two or three genuinely related guides.
• Fixed: the header, footer and related-tools sections were empty in the HTML and built by JavaScript, so the page source carried no site navigation. They are now rendered server-side as ordinary links.
• Fixed: sitemap lastmod was stamped with the build date for every URL on every build. It now reflects real per-page modification dates.
• Changed: the 404 page and the scan-history page are no longer indexed. Both still work and stay linked; neither has content a search result could usefully show.
• Changed: the 404 page now lists the most-used tools instead of offering two buttons.
• Rewritten: About now covers static versus dynamic codes, how your data is handled, who runs the site, and what these tools cannot do. Contact now explains what to include in a bug report so it can be reproduced.
• Expanded: category pages, the Wi-Fi, logo, UPC, EAN-13, Code 128, Code 39, bulk, label-maker and size-calculator tool pages, and the four shortest guides.

2026-08-02 — Four 2-D symbologies

• New tools: Data Matrix, GS1 DataMatrix, PDF417 and Aztec Code.
• Encoders are a build-time extract of bwip-js, derived from Barcode Writer in Pure PostScript. Every symbol the site can produce is decoded back by ZXing before release and compared against the input character for character.
• PDF417 rows are fixed at the 3:1 ratio ISO/IEC 15438 specifies rather than being adjustable, because a squashed symbol is one that stops scanning.

Earlier

• Interface redesign across the homepage, category pages, generators and scanners.
• Scan history made opt-in and off by default, with Wi-Fi passwords stripped before any entry is written.
• GS1-128 Application Identifier validation: data type, length, date format and check digit checked field by field, with FNC1 inserted according to the predefined-length rules.

Found something that changed but is not listed? Tell us — omissions here are bugs too.