I hope the following is conrete enough.
Imagine the following element:
<pi>3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582097494459230781640628620899
</pi>
(See http://www.joyofpi.com/pi.htm for details).
Suppose you are building a web services front-end to Macsyma (or
Mathematica). You might be tempted to add this attribute (assuming the
"obvious" xmlns declarations)
xsi:type=xsd:float
The problem is, that if you use something like DevStudio.Net and its
wizards, you've guaranteed to have lost precision. That's a shame,
because the math tool has effectively infinite precision, but my
XML/WS/XSD tool artificially limits itself to IEEE floats because it
thinks it's doing me a favor by making it trivial to generalize object
serialziation through XML.
Ok?
/r$
