RE: elementFormDefault="qualified" in WSDL Schema..

> The WSDL Schema ([1] or [2]) sets the elementFormDefault="qualified".
> This, AFAIK requires each element to qualified in the instance
> documents, requiring one to use ns qualifiers with many of the elements
> defined in the WSDL spec (<wsdl:message ..> <wsdl:service ..>
> <wsdl:portType ..> etc. where the namespace
> wsdl="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/wsdl/").  Most of the WSDL instance
> examples in the spec violate this. Why do we need to keep this? Can we
> change elementFormDefault="unqualified" and be done with it? Or am I
> mistaken here?

Many of the examples in the spec suffer from errors, but they should be
fixed instead of changing the spec. Unless you have a reason why local
elements should not be qualified, the status quo should be kept. A WSDL
document contains multiple namespaces. Arbitrarly changing the schema to use
unqualified local elements without a good reason will make reading and
processing WSDL more error prone and harder to read. Unqualified elements
should be used in situations similar to the use of unqualified attributes.
If the data contained in the element is useless without its parent or
siblings, using unqualified elements to reinforce this fact makes sense.
However, that is not the case here.

BTW, the WSDL schema doesn't appear to use local element definitions in any
case, making the argument moot.

David Cleary

Received on Thursday, 27 June 2002 11:59:13 UTC