I'm a big fan of Crockford-flavored Base32, as in $dayjob the folks who did some of the fundamental engineering work for the product I work with decided 10+ years ago to use Crockfor-flavored Base32 as the way to expose most user-visible IDs. Things I love about it are all mentioned in Crockford's spec, but I'll restate them here:
- It's case-insensitive allowing data encoded with it to survive going through most random line-of-business applications which may have errant UPPER() or lower() calls somewhere in their depths, as well as making it easy for humans to talk about out-loud (no need to specify case makes it easy)
- Making all the "pillar" shaped characters (I, i, 1, l) equivalent and all the "donut" shaped characters (o, O, 0) equivalent means big swaths of human typing mistakes are avoided. After so much exposure to Crockford Base32, I now loath having to decipher "is it a capitol 'I'? Or a lowercase 'l'?"
Overall, it's a great way to encode any user-facing ID; just make sure you understand that just using this encoding won't stop users from realizing that Crockford Base32 encoded IDs are sequential. If you want sequential IDs to appear non-obviously sequential after encoding you'll need to use additional techniques. Assuming Crockford Base32 obscures sequential IDs is the one case where I saw someone do something they shouldn't as it directly relates to Crockford Base32.
- It's case-insensitive allowing data encoded with it to survive going through most random line-of-business applications which may have errant UPPER() or lower() calls somewhere in their depths, as well as making it easy for humans to talk about out-loud (no need to specify case makes it easy)
- Making all the "pillar" shaped characters (I, i, 1, l) equivalent and all the "donut" shaped characters (o, O, 0) equivalent means big swaths of human typing mistakes are avoided. After so much exposure to Crockford Base32, I now loath having to decipher "is it a capitol 'I'? Or a lowercase 'l'?"
Overall, it's a great way to encode any user-facing ID; just make sure you understand that just using this encoding won't stop users from realizing that Crockford Base32 encoded IDs are sequential. If you want sequential IDs to appear non-obviously sequential after encoding you'll need to use additional techniques. Assuming Crockford Base32 obscures sequential IDs is the one case where I saw someone do something they shouldn't as it directly relates to Crockford Base32.