Small technical CPPA schema question...

["Dale Moberg" <dmoberg@cyclonecommerce.com>]

Hi, 

I am restructuring/refactoring the 2.0 CPPA schema in connection with
the extensibility modifications. I have a small question about our
current schema that I am hoping someone can resolve.

<schema
targetNamespace="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/ebxml-cppa/schema/
cpp-cpa-2_0.xsd" xmlns:ds="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#"
xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
xmlns:tns="http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/ebxml-cppa/schema/cpp-cp
a-2_0.xsd" elementFormDefault="qualified"
attributeFormDefault="qualified" version="2_0b">


I am wondering why we have

attributeFormDefault="qualified" 

A gloss on this attribute is:

Indicates whether or not locally declared attributes should be qualified
in the instance. If the value of this attribute is 'unqualified', then
locally declared attributes are not qualified by the target namespace.
If the value of this attribute is 'qualified', then locally declared
attributes must be qualified by the target namespace. 

The schema primer notes:

In fact, attributes that are required to be qualified must be explicitly
prefixed because the XML-Namespaces specification does not provide a
mechanism for defaulting the namespaces of attributes. Attributes that
are not required to be qualified appear in instance documents without
prefixes, which is the typical case. 

We currently then require that our defined attributes have namespace
prefixes. This is legal but a little verbose. I am having a problem
identifying any strong reason why we have made this "atypical" decision.
Does anyone recall a special circumstance that led us to require that
the attributeFormDefault have the value "qualified"?