This is feedback by the XBRL Base Specification Working Group on the comment in http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/CR-xmlschema11-2-20110721/ that "the precisionDecimal datatype has been removed since there does not seem to be sufficient consensus in the community for its retention".

XBRL is a major standard based on XML, by XBRL International (http://xbrl.org), and we are the chairs of its base specification working group.   Using XBRL, Financial Reporting to the U.S., European, and Asian countries regulatory agencies (such as U.S. SEC), and International Banking community prudential reporting, is all done in XBRL, based on XML.

Reporting of numeric elements requires precision and XML decimals data types.  XBRL users have clear and present need for precisionDecimal as a data type, and as part of XPath's near term evolution.  XBRL at present is forced to use an attribute to report precision of each numeric element, and without intrinsic schema support, the arithmetic operations of XPath are not supportive of precison-based operations of the underlying IEEE floating point standard.

Please let us know how we can better communicate the importance of this feature, and effectively work together with your working group.

    Mark Goodhand, CoreFiling
    Herm Fischer, Mark V Systems