Hey Julien, as far as I understand the XML standard, the attribute value has to be normalized by any compliant implementation so that leading and trailing whitespace must be removed before processing the value.
Section 3.3.3, "Attribute-Value Normalization" ( https://www.w3.org/TR/xml/#AVNormalize) states: Before the value of an attribute is passed to the application or checked > for validity, the XML processor MUST normalize the attribute value [...] Pay attention to the line below the algorithm: > If the attribute type is not CDATA, then the XML processor MUST further > process the normalized attribute value by discarding any leading and > trailing space (#x20) characters, and by replacing sequences of space > (#x20) characters by a single space (#x20) character. With that said, the `ref` attribute ( https://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema11-1/#ref.elt.global) of a schema is just a regular XML attribute and should therefore be normalized by Xerces. If you believe this is a bug, you may want to file it under http://xerces.apache.org/xerces-c/bug-report.html. Cheers, René
