Does anybody have resources relating to using correct-battery-horse-staple style random word picking from a large dictionary as identifiers? And, like, length/dictionary-size/count factors regarding chance of collisions? I think I'm doing my math right, but I'm outside my confidence zone with it.

I'm considering a situation which I think is pretty common: I'm likely to have a lot of things, I don't want to use database auto-increment IDs for well-known reasons, but UUIDs are both overkill and pretty human unfriendly (e.g. to read over the phone to support, say).

And I thought: What if the ID of your thing was disclose-puzzle-eccentric-outlet-darken-pot or something.

Tangent, I would personally lean towards also making this ID a pseudo-URI and just use the n-words as the final bit, but that's a pretty big tangent.

@benhamill don't make a pseudo-URI, make a tag: URI or urn:fdc: URI, which is the same thing but not pseudo-

@benhamill for opaque identifiers, my preference is a short Crockford Base32 number <https://www.crockford.com/base32.html> with checksum to catch transcription errors, but i can’t recommend tooling for keeping track of this (or a longer correct-horse-battery-staple kind)

if you’re namespacing these identifiers with domains and dates (as tag: / urn:fdc: requires), the problem of preventing collisions can at least be made pretty small

@Lady Tag is somewhat interesting... I'd want to still steal some of the ideas of the pURI document and put them in the last bit (specifically, the part about type information).

I can't find documentation on urn:fdc... I can't tell if it's my search ability or the internet being shit. You don't happen to have a link to documentation do you?

@benhamill https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4198.html

same idea, slightly different syntax

@Lady Thanks!