I'm looking at http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/JBAS-4891 with regard to how to handle unmarshalling qnames from legacy descriptors that don't support namespaces. If a document like this is unmarshalled:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE jboss PUBLIC
 "-//JBoss//DTD JBOSS 4.2//EN"
 "http://www.jboss.org/j2ee/dtd/jboss_4_2.dtd">
<!-- Id -->
<jboss>
...
 <service-ref>
 <service-ref-name>SecureService</service-ref-name>
<service-impl-class>org.jboss.tests.ws.jaxws.webserviceref.SecureEndpointService</service-impl-class>
 <service-qname>{http://org.jboss.ws/wsref}SecureEndpointService</service-qname>
 <port-component-ref>
 <service-endpoint-interface>org.jboss.tests.ws.jaxws.webserviceref.SecureEndpoint</service-endpoint-interface>
 <port-qname>{http://org.jboss.ws/wsref}SecureEndpointPort</port-qname>
 <stub-property>
 <prop-name>javax.xml.ws.security.auth.username</prop-name>
 <prop-value>kermit</prop-value>
 </stub-property>
 <stub-property>
 <prop-name>javax.xml.ws.security.auth.password</prop-name>
 <prop-value>thefrog</prop-value>
 </stub-property>
 </port-component-ref>
 </service-ref>

Caused by: java.lang.IllegalStateException: No namespace URI registered for prefix: {http
 at org.jboss.xb.binding.SimpleTypeBindings.unmarshalQName(SimpleTypeBindings.java:1993)
 at org.jboss.xb.binding.SimpleTypeBindings.unmarshal(SimpleTypeBindings.java:739)
 at org.jboss.xb.binding.sunday.unmarshalling.CharactersHandler.unmarshal(CharactersHandler.java:114)
 ... 41 more