On 4/19/2012 2:11 PM, Dave Allured wrote:
Sean,

I run into this frequently, especially with files that do not come
from carefully crafted official archives.  I regard all flavors of
range attributes as frequently unreliable.  I think best practice is
to extract ranges directly from the coordinate values when plotting
data on the fly, and pay no attention to incorrect secondary metadata.
  This should be simple to code and have no performance penalty.

--Dave

In this case, its the data values that have to be read, in order to know what the data range is, which may be expensive. As long as they are hints that can be modified by the user, seems safe to use.

OTOH, valid_min, valid_max are quite dangerous if they are not correct, as seth found out. Generic software really has no choice but to respect them. I recommend leaving them off if you dont actually need them.
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