On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 12:32 AM, Benjamin Black <b@b3k.us> wrote:
a 4th option, which i rather prefer since the units stuff tends to be relevant to and consumed by humans via UI rather than machines via API, is not to use units at all.

<memory>2147483648</memory>

either of the above is far easier to transform to and from non-XML representations, in my experience, with the latter being zero effort.  a couple extra bytes won't harm us and we adhere to my first engineering rule: the best solution to a problem is not to have it in the first place.

Andy and I spent a few hours on the phone tonight getting ourselves aligned and this was basically the conclusion we came to as well (though we were talking about choosing e.g. megabytes for memory, gigabytes for disk and gigahertz for processors). If we want/need to add units later we always can but they do then to make implementations fugly too.

Sam