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 should be used whenever possible to state the units of measure, such as “pages”, “minutes”, “paragraphs”, “MB”, etc., which is typically given in the plural.

<book-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 <book-page-count> 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:

<book-page-count count="26"/>

In element-style citations (<element-citation>), 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 tag:

<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 in the <size> tag:

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