[xsd] cvc-elt.1: Cannot find the declaration of element 'MyElement'

I'm trying to validate a really simple xml using xsd, but for some reason I get this error. I'll really appreciate if someone can explain me why.

XML File

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> 
<MyElement>A</MyElement>

XSD File

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<schema xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
        targetNamespace="http://www.example.org/Test"
        xmlns:tns="http://www.example.org/Test"
        elementFormDefault="qualified">

    <simpleType name="MyType">
        <restriction base="string"></restriction>
    </simpleType>

    <element name="MyElement" type="tns:MyType"></element>
</schema>

I had this error for my XXX element and it was because my XSD was wrongly formatted according to javax.xml.bind v2.2.11 . I think it's using an older XSD format but I didn't bother to confirm.

My initial wrong XSD was alike the following:

<xs:element name="Document" type="Document"/>
...
<xs:complexType name="Document">
    <xs:sequence>
        <xs:element name="XXX" type="XXX_TYPE"/>
    </xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType>

The good XSD format for my migration to succeed was the following:

<xs:element name="Document">
    <xs:complexType>
        <xs:sequence>
            <xs:element ref="XXX"/>
        </xs:sequence>
    </xs:complexType>        
</xs:element>
...
<xs:element name="XXX" type="XXX_TYPE"/>

And so on for every similar XSD nodes.

I got this same error working in Eclipse with Maven with the additional information

schema_reference.4: Failed to read schema document 'https://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd', because 1) could not find the document; 2) the document could not be read; 3) the root element of the document is not <xsd:schema>.

This was after copying in a new controller and it's interface from a Thymeleaf example. Honestly, no matter how careful I am I still am at a loss to understand how one is expected to figure this out. On a (lucky) guess I right clicked the project, clicked Maven and Update Project which cleared up the issue.

After making the change suggested above by Martin, I was still getting the same error. I had to make an additional change to my parsing code. I was parsing the XML file via a DocumentBuilder as shown in the oracle docs: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/javax/xml/validation/package-summary.html

// parse an XML document into a DOM tree
DocumentBuilder parser = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance().newDocumentBuilder();
Document document = parser.parse(new File("example.xml"));

The problem was that DocumentBuilder is not namespace aware by default. The following additional change resolved the issue:

// parse an XML document into a DOM tree
DocumentBuilderFactory dmfactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
dmfactory.setNamespaceAware(true);

DocumentBuilder parser = dmfactory.newDocumentBuilder();
Document document = parser.parse(new File("example.xml"));