Sorry for the delay getting back to this.

Two people whose views I consider authoritative on things XML Schema, Roger Costello and Priscilla Walmsley (author of "Definitive XML Schema", which is my Bible, anyway, both say that xpath expressions that want to refer to an element that is in a namespace, *must* use a prefix to do so.

Definitive XML Schema page 390, Section 17.8, says that the XPath subset in XSD steps, that are qualified element names, Table 17-6 says "A child element-type name which must be prefixed if it is in a namespace".

I cannot yet trace this back to something in the XML Schema specs, but it is in print there, in a quite authoritative and influential book on XML Schema.

I would be inclined to follow this semantics. Xerces does, other tools do. It's not consistent with global names - where the default namespace is used to determine their namespace, but it is one consistent rule.

...mikeb