If you ever spent a misspent evening in the deathmatch arenas of Quake III Arena, the string q3dm9 means something to you, viscerally, without translation. It is the internal name of a map. Not a marketing name, not a focus-grouped name, just a file identifier: game three, deathmatch, number nine. To almost everyone it is gibberish. To the people who lived in it, it is a place, complete with its geometry, its jump pads, and the exact corner where you always got ambushed.
Here is the thing that has stuck with me for years: q3dm9 is a terrible name and a perfect identifier, and the tension between those two facts is the whole lesson. A marketer would have called it "Crimson Fortress of Doom." The engineers called it q3dm9, and q3dm9 is the one people still type into a search box two decades later.
Why did the ugly name win? Because it never lied and never changed. A descriptive name makes a promise the content has to keep. An opaque, systematic identifier makes no promise at all, so it never breaks one. It is stable precisely because it is meaningless. It cannot go out of date, because it was never in date.
The most durable identifiers are the ones that carry no opinion. An opinion can be wrong later. A serial number is never embarrassed.
Every craftsperson who has ever renamed a page and broken a thousand links has met this tension. We are told to write human-readable, keyword-rich URLs, and we should. But there is a second, quieter virtue: an identifier should still make sense to the thing it points at after everyone forgets why it was chosen. The web is littered with slugs like /2019-summer-sale-final-v2-USE-THIS-ONE, which are neither human nor stable, the worst of both worlds.
The naming choices that age gracefully tend to share a few traits:
Use readable slugs for the pages that court strangers, the front doors where a descriptive name genuinely helps someone decide to click. But for the deep, permanent bones of a system, the canonical identifiers, the asset names, the things other things will link to for years, lean toward the boring and the stable. Do not encode this week's marketing into a string you will have to honor forever.
q3dm9 was named by someone who was not trying to be memorable, and it became unforgettable. There is a marketing lesson in that, and it is almost the opposite of what marketing usually says: sometimes the way to be remembered is to stop performing and just be reliably, dependably, unglamorously the same thing every time someone comes back.