You can make a key long/complex enough to encode information, like an email address. Then it’s human-readable, and tells the user useful stuff. “Huh… W1S-BondSt-1234-EVPremium? I didn’t mean to use the expensive charger!”
Or you make keys entirely meaningless, just random numbers, with a publicly access…
You can make a key long/complex enough to encode information, like an email address. Then it’s human-readable, and tells the user useful stuff. “Huh… W1S-BondSt-1234-EVPremium? I didn’t mean to use the expensive charger!”
Or you make keys entirely meaningless, just random numbers, with a publicly accessible API to look up the associated properties (which can now be VASTLY more data than you could encode in a usable key).
Option 2 is better. If you want human-readable, you can still create aliases that point to a specific key, just like DNS.
Trying to embed data in a compact key… that way madness lies. People give examples like telephone area codes, but I’m old enough to remember how confused my parents were when all the area codes had to be changed by adding a 1 after the leading 0, and I’m personally suffering from Sheffield running out of 01142 numbers and having to change the code to just 0114, which nobody believes.
There are two valid approaches here.
You can make a key long/complex enough to encode information, like an email address. Then it’s human-readable, and tells the user useful stuff. “Huh… W1S-BondSt-1234-EVPremium? I didn’t mean to use the expensive charger!”
Or you make keys entirely meaningless, just random numbers, with a publicly accessible API to look up the associated properties (which can now be VASTLY more data than you could encode in a usable key).
Option 2 is better. If you want human-readable, you can still create aliases that point to a specific key, just like DNS.
Trying to embed data in a compact key… that way madness lies. People give examples like telephone area codes, but I’m old enough to remember how confused my parents were when all the area codes had to be changed by adding a 1 after the leading 0, and I’m personally suffering from Sheffield running out of 01142 numbers and having to change the code to just 0114, which nobody believes.