Gary,

Nobody's suggesting we leave units undefined - rather that we define them globally, dropping the convenience (and complexity) of supporting multiple units (e.g. Mb, Gb, Tb) for each parameter.

Sam

On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 3:06 AM, Gary Mazz <garymazzaferro@gmail.com> wrote:
I think units are a very important issue. More significant than atom/json/xlm discussions. I think someone pushed a satellite  into mars  over a foot/meter  discrepancy.

What  if its an e911 or other emergency application running on a cloud. It really helps to reduce operational risk with a page of text in a spec.

-gary


Andre Merzky wrote:
Oh well...  - you can't make everybody happy.  At the end
one needs to decide on one of the options, and either way,
just getting rid of units (by defining them as fixed) seems
like a good solution.  As others stated: a UI can always
represent a more suitable version...

A

Quoting [Gary Mazz] (May 26 2009):
 
Just as an fyi, media folks work in "bits"

-gary


Andre Merzky wrote:
   
Quoting [Sam Johnston] (May 26 2009):
       
 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).          
I think that is a great compromise: simple format, + human
readable.

Andre.