HAHAHA. Great post. :)

I think I field that question fairly regularly personally and in the newsgroups as well. I agree, don't reuse, first you tend to do bad things like jamming unrelated info into a misnamed attribute or start stacking info up in the attribute.

I have one thing to say on the being cavalier... This is why you do it RIGHT!!!! Don't be afraid of doing schema updates, be afraid of doing them half-ass. Get a valid OID, don't use OIDGen or make them up. Look on the MSFT website and make sure that the oid and linkids and prefixes are registered unique for every vendor that comes to you with an extension. Question EVERY change you want to make, does it really make sense.

On the flip side, App vendors, allow your customers to use different attributes. They may already have an attribute that does what you need in your app, allow them a mechanism to remap the attributes you use so they don't have to duplicate data...

That's all for now. Again great post. I laughed at loud when I read the SSID part....

 joe