Re:How long do GUIDs really need to be?
by zackbloom on Friday October 31, 2014 @03:49PM
(#8540741)
It becomes a stylistic choice, but I can say we weren't happy with the experience the longer ids gave users. It made most of the url a random hash of characters, not anything significant. The URL is as much a part of the UX as anything else.
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"The URL is as much a part of the UX as anything else."
Given what we've seen from the browser vendors lately (hiding bits of the address bar, etc), I'd say there's a lot of momentum to disagree with that statement.
I think it depends on who your customer is / what your product is. When I'm developing against an api, I end up writing API calls in my terminal to test things. I prefer cleaner URLs for APIs.
Is the difference between bkirwi's two examples really significant? The eager.io URL is still a mash of random characters.
(FWIW I like seeing UUIDs in my URLs, because it tells me that the company on the other end has its shit together. That might be a bit programmer-specific though)