This Tag Set has a single general purpose element <size> for recording the number of pages in a book, the showing time of a film, the number of kilo/mega/tera-bytes in a dataset, or any other measurement of size, length, or extent that may be recorded for a cited work.

The @units attribute must be used on <size> to state the units of measure, such as “pages”, “minutes”, “paragraphs”, “MB”, etc. A units value is typically given in the plural (“pages” not “page”).

<page-count> is a metadata element in the description of the work that records similar page-size information for the work rather than for cited material. The <size> and <page-count> elements are modeled very differently. The size element is assumed to contain the textual value of the size:

<size units="paragraphs">8</size>

while the page count element is an EMPTY element that stores its value in the @count attribute:

<page-count count="26"/>

In element-style citations (<element-citation>), displaying the units can be handled in the following ways

• If the @units attribute value has been tagged consistently, the text can be generated on display and does not have to be included in the element content:

  <size units="pages">256</size>
  

• If the publisher or archive does not wish to generate text based on the attribute or the attributes have not been tagged consistently, the text can be included as content in the <size> tag:

  <size units="pages">256 pages</size>