6.12. Opacity

As general guidance, avoiding parsing UUID values unnecessarily is recommended; instead, treat UUIDs as opaquely as possible. Although application-specific concerns could, of course, require some degree of introspection (e.g., to examine Sections 4.1 or 4.2 or perhaps the timestamp of a UUID), the advice here is to avoid this or other parsing unless absolutely necessary. Applications typically tend to be simpler, be more interoperable, and perform better when this advice is followed.