# trying to understand the elliptic curve format for XML Signatures

https://www.w3.org/TR/xmldsig-core/#sec-ECKeyValue gives the following example of an ECDSA key:

<ECKeyValue xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2009/xmldsig11#">
<NamedCurve URI="urn:oid:1.2.840.10045.3.1.7" />
<PublicKey>
vWccUP6Jp3pcaMCGIcAh3YOev4gaa2ukOANC7Ufg
Cf8KDO7AtTOsGJK7/TA8IC3vZoCy9I5oPjRhyTBulBnj7Y
</PublicKey>
</ECKeyValue>


Here's what it says regarding the encoding of the PublicKey:

The PublicKey element contains a Base64 encoding of a binary representation of the x and y coordinates of the point. Its value is computed as follows:

• Convert the elliptic curve point (x,y) to an octet string by first converting the field elements x and y to octet strings as specified in Section 6.2 of [ECC-ALGS] (note), and then prepend the concatenated result of the conversion with 0x04. Support for Elliptic-Curve-Point-to-Octet-String conversion without point compression is required.
• Base64 encode the octet string resulting from the conversion in Step 1.

From that I'd expect that the first character of the base64 decoded text would be 04 but it isn't. It's BD. Here's the full decoded value:

bd671c50fe89a77a5c68c08621c021dd839ebf881a6b6ba4380342ed47e009ff0a0ceec0b533ac1892bbfd303c202def6680b2f48e683e3461c9306e9419e3ed


So what gives? Am I misunderstanding something or is the example they provide a bad one? If the latter then where might I find a good example?