title: Best Practices - Should meta data and functional defining data be intermixed?
body: <p>Consider the case of a simple news article web application that has a DB table column of "Status" that is accessible by a radio button set of:</p>
  
  <p>Status - [x] Publish [ ] Draft [ ] Archive</p>
  
  <p>...where "Publish" shows an article publicly and "Draft" and "Archive" do not.  Functionally "Draft" and "Archive" do the same thing but carry additional meta data meanings.  The two functional states of "show" and "hide" along with the meta data of "publish", "draft" and "archive" are intermixed in the same column of "status".</p>
  
  <p>Is this a good practice?  While this is a very simple case, larger cases might reveal flaws with such a practice (or not...).</p>