I've followed the rule that if the property is of the underlying data representation, use children, and if it's a (meta-ish) property of the XML implementation,

I've followed the rule that if the property is of the underlying data representation, use children, and if it's a (meta-ish) property of the XML implementation, or some contextual annotation, use an attribute. In your example, something like: <users total="100" cursor="123453"> <user> <id type="int">123456</id> <name type="string">Joe</name> <accounts> <account> <name type="string">Account 1</name> </account> </accounts> </user> </users>