This is an archived snapshot of W3C's public bugzilla bug tracker, decommissioned in April 2019. Please see the home page for more details.
In email to the XML Schema comments list on 5 September 2008 (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-schema-comments/2008JulSep/0135.html), Peter F. Patel-Schneider raised the following issue (among others): 2/ Partial implementation limits for infinite datatypes 2.1/ Incorrect treatment of decimal The OWL WG also noticed what appears to be a problem with partial implementation limits for the infinite datatypes [1]. The LC draft says All minimally conforming processors must support decimal values whose absolute value is less than 10^16 (i.e., those expressible with sixteen total digits). but decimals can have fractional parts, so the non-parenthetical part appears to require infinite-precision decimals. Perhaps what was meant was to require support of only those decimal values that can be written using at most 16 decimal digits, i.e., to require support of 12.34567890123456 but not 12.3456789012345678901234567890123456789 The WG strongly suggests that this change be made to the LC draft. Otherwise the WG will be requiring minimal conformance that is less stringent than the minimal conformance in the LC draft.
Ouch. Thank you very much for pointing out this editorial botch. The intent was as indicated in the parenthetical; it is embarrassing that the mismatch between the two formulations escaped the editors' notice during so many revisions. I'm marking this editorial, since it's reasonably clear from the WG's decision record what the intent of the WG was.
The bullet item in question should read (and does in fact read, in the current status-quo draft): All ·minimally conforming· processors must support decimal values whose absolute value can be expressed as i / 10k, where i and k are nonnegative integers such that i < 10^16 and k ≤ 16 (i.e., those expressible with sixteen total digits). The last-call draft SHOULD have had this text, but did not, owing to a clerical error made by me in the runup to the publication of the last-call draft. In the confident expectation that this resolves the issue, I'm marking this issue as resolved. If you agree, please so indicate by changing the status of the issue to CLOSED; if you disagree, please REOPEN the issue and indicate in the comment what is wrong. If we don't hear from you in the next two weeks, we'll assume that you are content with the correction.