It's a good thing to avoid, because prefixes
are of course not themselves significant, and software can change
the actual prefixes, and sometimes does.
An attribute value declared in a W3C XML Schema to be a QName
or a list of QNames may well have prefixes changed inside it
automatically, as necessary (e.g. XQuery and XSLT 2 support this
idea), but of course most software isnt' Schema-aware.
Above from a knowledgable source in W3C
On which basis I'd advise against QNAMES in attribute values
regards
--
Dave Pawson
XSLT XSL-FO FAQ.
http://www.dpawson.co.uk
