Re: [xml-dev] elementFormDefault [was:Venetian Blinds vs Garden ofEden]

[Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>]

On 10/29/2010 05:32 PM, Mukul Gandhi wrote:
>> I personally do not agree that only elementFormDefault="qualified"
>> should exist (either by syntax or implicitly available by language
>> design) in XML schema language. Allowing schema authors to specify
>> either "qualified" or "unqualified" for elements (and also for
>> attributes) is a significant design made into the XML Schema language
>> (and i personally do find this OK :)

Yes, it's by design, but it's a bad design, in my view. Someone thought 
attributes and elements should be symmetric, so the choice of "same 
namespace as parent" and "no namespace" should be available for both. 
But very few people want to put child elements in no namespace, or 
attributes in the parent namespace, and I think there are good reasons 
for that. Giving both the same default was a particularly bad idea. And 
there are so many other asymmetries between elements and attributes that 
fixing this one on its own was pretty pointless. It's a classic example 
of how the design of XSD 1.0 suffered from many good people with good 
ideas pulling the language in different directions.

Michael Kay
Saxonica