A standard format would be useful for seamless integration with other systems: Wikipedia, search engines, AI agents, knowledge bases, etc., so that they could easily navigate to a specific document in your wiki or even analyze several related documents. Electronic documents in other information systems often have a structured text format (JSON, YAML, Markdown, TOON), rather than a binary format. Therefore, it’s important to have a standard text UUID format, not just a binary (128-bit) format.
The goal of “Be manageable by non-techy users” is flawed from a UX perspective. Users should be able to manipulate documents, not UUIDs. UUIDs should be hidden from users “under the hood.” Users should be able to see the document title or even its revision history. But there’s no reason why users should see the UUID itself. Even copying a UUID can be done by clicking on the UUID identicon or the document title.
The goal of “Use it to create TW pretty-links [[link text|FdAvT+vs]] that can be remembered if you need to” is also wrong from a UX perspective. There’s no need to force the user to remember anything. Links should be saved in folders and in logs with the navigation history. If you need to determine whether two UUIDs match, you can quickly do so by comparing their identicons or searching the text. If you only have a UUID in text format, you can match several characters in the right-hand random parts of the UUID.
It’s wrong to enter a UUID from the keyboard. Copy-paste is for that.
All UUIDv7 are equally collision-resistant, regardless of the text format. Even if you mistype one or more characters when entering them from the keyboard, the likelihood of collisions is practically zero due to the long random part.
We do not force users to tinker with UUIDs, but they will do it anyway, because they can. Usually we try to “hide” complexity from readers. But TW is designed, that users can modify it, with low risk to completely break something. So tinkerers will change stuff in ways the devs never have imagined. If you break something you delete that tiddler and the shadow tiddler with the same title will take over again. - That’s an intended usecase.
We need to expose information about the created UUID eg: c62 is “compressed”. Since it is not human readable anymore and you want to extract the timestamp from it, you need to know if it actually does contain a timestamp. If [c62[version]] returns 4, it does not make sense to read a timestamp, because there is none. At least it is not valid.
For TW created c62 fields users can assume, that there is a timestamp. But what if content is imported from 3rd party sources. We need to check the version of the UUID first, to see how it makes sense in our context.
That’s why this plugin is highly experimental. Everything is exposed to see, what does make sense and what does not.
There is no wrong or right at the moment. There are possibilities, which have to be explored.
in the spirit of: There are possibilities , which have to be explored…
This may be a worthy opportunity to position for AI interactions:
I’ve been testing the use of various markup strings in several Chat environments, with a strong focus on Unicode characters. When you open up the your alphabet like that, it quickly becomes a Personal Language - which is just fine when using the TW NodeJs version.
One immediate impression is that the rate of AI evolution is extremely fast (and hard to keep up with) and it’s also fraught with inconsistencies among the various underlying AI engines. That pushed me back to the realization that Ctrl+f does work in the vast majority of cases, making it a good “in Chat” navigation tool. Since “Conversations” can fill up quite quickly adding a standard “LandingZone” makes it possible to link the conversations and exploit the immutable characteristic of the “Talk”. This becomes “autoMagical” via a couple of *.md(s) - a common AI memory management tool.
I think this is a promising direction ( in spite of being teased about “squiggles” like 午㋃㏽ = a 3 character YYYY-0MM-0DD encoding in the base60 system Chinese zodiac - Wikipedia . That’s particular true when you start to used Unicode ranges of fonts to distinguish Lattice lanes like Mathematicians do ( different fonts let them distinguish/identify the branches of math and their formulas).
Personally, I am ( cautiously) delighted by the ways TW and AI can interact.
There are some fascinating developments going on in this area. Here’s Paul Kinlan outlining a knowledge management approach based on an LLM working on a bunch of Markdown files:
