Another thing is that you don’t necessarily need to encode uuids canonically. They are just u128’s. It’s relatively straightforward to find a url friendly string representation that is shorter.
> It’s relatively straightforward to find a url friendly string representation that is shorter.
Are we talking about shortening the whole URL or shortening specific UUIDs? If the latter then I imagine one would still need to keep track of the mapping UUID <-> shorten version, somewhere, right? If so, why not just add yet another field/column for an old good numeric integer that can be used for filtering? Would that work?
You could simply base32, base36 or base64 encode the UUID's (as an example).
Other than that; in IE6 times URL's had a limitation of 1K or 4K or something around that lenght IIRC, so unless you're using dozens of UUID's in a URL this hasn't been a problem for ages.
Another thing is that you don’t necessarily need to encode uuids canonically. They are just u128’s. It’s relatively straightforward to find a url friendly string representation that is shorter.