Creating barcodes on your pages

You might want to use barcodes on your web site for delivering coupons to your visitors. Microsoft, has started using them as admission tickets for live events. So I sign up on their web site for a live event in my area and they send me to an admission ticket web page, which I then print out. I bring the page I printed out to the event and they scan the barcode to know that I'm really registerd and who I am, what organization I belong to, etc.

We developed an online workflow application for our HR department, to intelligently route HR-related changes to employee records. The only issue we had remaining was to figure out how to "attach" paperwork that may be related to a change action (i.e. marriage certificate to support a name change).

Obviously, rolling scanners out to 300+ managers was out of the question. But we do have a rather cool document scanning/archival application that utilizes barcoded seperator pages to index the archived document images.

My solution was to add a button to the online action form called "Attach Paperwork". Clicking the button would generate a fax cover page with the workflow incident ID barcoded on it. The cover page would instruct the manager to print out the cover page and fax the paperwork to a predetermined number. That fax number would be to a fax board on the archival system, which would then archive and index the images so the workflow product could "attach" it to the workflow incident.

The only part of this that was hanging up development was figuring out the best way to dynamically generate the barcode. Thanks for a VERY timely article, Phillip!!

Mark Petereit
HRIS Systems Administrator
Truman Medical Center, Kansas City

The author forgot the xmlns attribute:

Change the to

He forgot to declare the VML name space. Since he also didn't bother to add a DOCTYPE so IE 6 knows what version of HTML he is using, this causes other problems. Basically, the VML tags he created without the VML namespace will not be closed. So in IE 6 you will get and not . IE 6 sees a bunch of non-closed tags and doesn't display anything since there is no data content. The VML behaviour doesn't see the namespace so it doesn't act upon the tags. He should re-read the MSDN documentation and pay attention to the examples... But cool example once it does work.

...of standards like DHTML, CSS, SVG, LSMFT, etc., to have open, portable data formats so that we wouldn't get locked into one vendor's product line, or worse, one specific version of one specific product? It seems to me that some of the folks saying "Yeah, standards are great, as long as you're using IE" miss the whole point. Maybe they should go talk to some mainframe jockeys from the '60s and '70s so they can understand why we had a PC "revolution". Hint: it wasn't merely to substitute one corporate megalith for another.

After making the change to the tag and adding