A co-worker was just showing me a situation where another developer had written a validation framework which was only used on 2 pages. I've seen this pattern again and again, and I've put a phrase to the thought:

Premature generalization is the new premature optimization.

And it, too, is evil.

Today, I had this XML document which I was wanting to make viewable in a browser. My plan was to run the XML document through an XSLT engine to transform it into an HTML document (which could then be opened in a browser).

Instead, I found that I could just embed the XSLT directly in the XML document. Then, when this file is opened in a browser, the XSLT executes and spits out HTML, which is then rendered into the browser window. This is great because I now have the original XML file (which we wanted to keep further analysis purposes) which can also be rendered nicely in a browser.

Here's an example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xml" href="#stylesheet"?>
<!DOCTYPE catelog ...