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in an xml-centric processing environment, xml:* attributes can appear in various locations in xml documents, sometimes because of authors or authoring tools (xml:lang), sometimes because of xml technologies (xinclude). it would be good if a schema could more easily accommodate these attributes than by having to add them everywhere in the schema. whether this is something that will only address xml:* attributes, or attributes in general (from any namespace) is something that i would like to leave open for discussion, but it certainly would be useful to have an easy way to plug together w3c xml technologies without having to resort to rather cumbersome and brittle ways of specifying things. i do think this is an important issue, because otherwise the whole xml pipelining model becomes more or less unusable for pipelines involving schema validation and xinclude (and possible more specs to come). currently, this might not be something many people are using, but think that the individual components of such a pipelining environment should be designed in a way so that they actually can be used together. the current solution (manually add wildcards everywhere) is technically feasible, but not something anybody will actually do.
The following was proposed to solve this issue. A new attribute "defaultAttributes" is introduced on the <schema> element, whose value is a QName as a reference to an attribute group definition. When this attribute is specified, all complex types defined withint this <schema> gets the attribute group as if a reference to it was specified in <complexType>. Complex types can use an attribute "defaultAttributesApply" to indicate whether such defaulting is desired. The schema WG adopted this proposal at the 2007-03 face to face meeting. The specific wording will appear in the next working draft of schema 1.1 structures. Eric, as the originator, please indicate whether this resolution is satisfactory to you, by either closing this bug or reopening it. Thanks.
A month having been passed without response from the originator, we conclude that silence implies consent. Accordingly, I'm marking this issue CLOSED. Dr. Wilde, you are still able to indicate dissatisfaction with the disposition of the issue by REOPENing it. But I hope you will find the change adopted by the WG an adequate resolution of the issue.