This is an archived snapshot of W3C's public bugzilla bug tracker, decommissioned in April 2019. Please see the home page for more details.
AFAIK attribute prohibitions (use="prohibited") are only significant when restricting a type; i.e. when they appear as children of <restriction> and <complexType>. Any other occurrences of such prohibitions should be pointless, but there's no consensus between various schema processors. An explicit statement about where prohibitions are pointless could be of help here. Generating a warning when we hit such pointless prohibitions would deminish confusion on the schema authors side.
In an effort to make better use of Bugzilla, we are going to use the 'severity' field to classify issues by perceived difficulty. This bug is getting severity=minor to reflect the existing whiteboard note 'easy'.
A wording proposal including changes for this issue went to the WG on 7 February 2008: http://www.w3.org/XML/Group/2004/06/xmlschema-1/structures.consent.200801.html#composition (member-only link).
The wording proposal adopted by the XML Schema Working Group today changes the third Note in section 3.4.2 to read Note: The only substantive function of the value prohibited for the use attribute of an <attribute> is in establishing the correspondence between a complex type defined by restriction and its XML representation. It serves to prevent inheritance of an identically named attribute use from the {base type definition}. Such an <attribute> does not correspond to any component, and hence there is no interaction with either explicit or inherited wildcards in the operation of Complex Type Definition Validation Rules (§3.4.4) or Constraints on Complex Type Definition Schema Components (§3.4.6). ↑It is pointless, though not an error, for the use attribute to have the value prohibited in other contexts (e.g. in complex type extensions or named model group definitions), in which cases the <attribute> element is simply ignored, provided that it does not violate other constraints in this specification.↑ The change consists of the addition of the sentence at the end: It is pointless, though not an error, for the use attribute to have the value prohibited in other contexts (e.g. in complex type extensions or named model group definitions), in which cases the <attribute> element is simply ignored, provided that it does not violate other constraints in this specification. With this change, the WG believes we have resolved this issue fully for XSD 1.1. Accordingly, I am going to - change the status of this issue (2311) to RESOLVED - FIXED - clone this issue to track the corresponding problem in 1.0 - set the status of that new issue accordingly, and add Kasimier Buchcik to the CC list for the new issue, as the originator of this issue Herr Buchcik, you should I hope receive email notifying you of this update to the bug report and thus of the WG's action on the issue. Please let us know if you agree with this resolution of your issue, by adding a comment to the issue record and changing the Status of the issue to Closed. Or, if you do not agree with this resolution, please add a comment explaining why. If you wish to appeal the WG's decision to the Director, then also change the Status of the record to Reopened. If you wish to record your dissent, but do not wish to appeal the decision to the Director, then change the Status of the record to Closed. If we do not hear from you in the next two weeks, we will assume you agree with the WG decision.