> I assume I will find somewhere in the xml spec that the decimal separator
> is '.'.  I shall go and look.
I doubt you will find such a thing in the XML spec.
That spec tells you "how to pack things" and does not care how you
represent the "things" you pack :-)


> The confusion for me, I suppose, is rooted in the intention of the
> designers 
> of xml that it should be human readable.  For me a file prepared in notepad 
> is built by a presentation oriented tool.  However, I can see that the 
> essance of xml is data interchange and therefore consistent formatting 
> should outweigh other considerations.
I agree human readable is nice, but if it kills the interchange part,
then it is useles.

You can also interpret it another way: the humans reading xml are not
regular humans, they are developers. Ant developers are used with
dot as decimal separator from all the programming languages.
In C++ double pi = 3.1416; no matter the language of the programmer.


-- 
Mihai Nita [Microsoft MVP, Windows - SDK]
http://www.mihai-nita.net
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