Hmm... I think I prefer the second option more (just remembering how I coded it). Where would you think the utility function should live? I personally don't like the idea of storing things in a string because I think it should be a map internally. With the chrome-like u.i. as suggested we could have all the keys and values parsed directly to a map I suppose. Then if we want to also support batch import/export we could use a utility function.