There can also be circumstances where you have to offer people a natural-looking key for general consumption. You can’t put UUID’s on car plates for example.
Often times, the first section of the UUID is unique enough. With certain UI design choices, one can encourage users to normally work with that, while having the full UUID available in a detail view or from a copy-button.
Another strategy I quite like, is to have the UUID as the definitely-always-unique identifier, and then have a separate name, which either the users can enter or we generate something like random adjective+animal.
But yes, neither of those strategies would work for car plates.
Speaking of car plates, the Wikipedia pages for “Vehicle license plates of [insert country here]” are a rabbit hole.
I was just reading the page for Romania the other day, speaking of uniqueness, and they had this issue apparently where the combinations overall were enough for the whole country but not enough for their capital city, so they had to hack an extra digit into the plates for the capital.
Often times, the first section of the UUID is unique enough. With certain UI design choices, one can encourage users to normally work with that, while having the full UUID available in a detail view or from a copy-button.
Another strategy I quite like, is to have the UUID as the definitely-always-unique identifier, and then have a separate name, which either the users can enter or we generate something like random adjective+animal.
But yes, neither of those strategies would work for car plates.
Speaking of car plates, the Wikipedia pages for “Vehicle license plates of [insert country here]” are a rabbit hole.
I was just reading the page for Romania the other day, speaking of uniqueness, and they had this issue apparently where the combinations overall were enough for the whole country but not enough for their capital city, so they had to hack an extra digit into the plates for the capital.