I'm very suspicious when someone says "because it is bad design" and then doesn't follow that up with specifics on why it is a bad design. (Is it a bad user design? A bad programming design? Is the person that you're talking to worried about being confused by the flexibility? Worried about users making a mess of things? Worried that users will be confused? Will it force you to write a lot of very generic code when you could write something simple?) If I know how the other person thinks it is bad, then I can form my own impression of whether I agree. (Sometimes you have to live with decisions that you disagree with.) Eventually my trained impressions may become useful opinions.

Depending on specifics that you haven't given us, I could wind up choosing either design. I personally like providing a more generic design with the hope that I can get people to solve their own problems using the flexibility. That isn't always workable in the real world. I enumerated a few of the possible reasons above in my list of reasons that someone might think that a bad design.

In reply to Re: Design opinion, configuration inheritance by tilly
in thread Design opinion, configuration inheritance by naChoZ

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.