As part of an Identification Badge program that I was asked to write here at Security International, I needed to support printing both Magnetic Stripes and Barcodes on an ID card.  I wanted a Barcode library that was written entirely in C#, came with source, no runtime license of course and not too expensive.  Sound Impossible?  Well I found one that I liked at Mabry that met all of those conditions!  I haven’t tried compiling it on any other CLI implementation yet, but I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work on say the SSCLI.  I reworked the code a little bit adding a number of things including XML serialization.  This made me wonder why there is no standard for XML Barcodes.  I did some searching and found Krysalis a Java based Open Source project that confirmed I was of course not the first to think XML Barcodes would be useful.  If there are specific standards for things like MathML, then I think BarcodeXML is certainly not outlandish and probably more useful.

Think of the usefulness of BarcodeXML with other XML standards like XML Encryption, XML Signature, SVG and XSLT.  It would be nice to have a standard set of transforms to transform from one Barcode symbology to another!  Being able to pass a barcode through dissimilar systems securely using XML would be more than is possible today.  Instead of storing an Image or Binary Serialized object in a database as a BLOB (Binary Large Object), BarcodeXML would allow a standard, and searchable, way of storing the data.  This would also be useful when embedding Barcodes in an application like a Word-Processing application.  Then anyone could tell there was a Barcode embedded in the document without needing some arbitrary library from a specific vendor.

Using Barcode.Net, my XML Serialization Modifications and SharpVectorGraphics this could be achieved for any CLI implementation that had strong support for the System.Drawing.Drawing2D.  However, this would still be quite an undertaking to achieve agreement on a standard XML Schema for each Standard Barcode Symbology.  Maybe someone with connections to the W3C will someday lobby for BarcodeXML.  Although I think if BarcodeXML did happen, it could possibly bet met with a large amount of opposition from Barcode Component Vendors.