Two constructs are flat in the schema document, so they escape the parser's element-nesting maxDepth (256) yet make a content model arbitrarily deep once compiled: a <xs:group ref> chain and a complexContent derivation chain (the definitions are siblings). The particle compiler inlines each group reference and composes each derivation once per link, overflowing the stack on a long chain. The expanded depth is now bounded by one counter (XSDContext.expansionDepth, incremented at each compositor level, group-reference expansion, and derivation step) against maximumContentModelExpansionDepth (512); a model past the bound is rejected with a located error, not crashed. The counter lives in a value-type context so it tracks depth not width (no width false positive), and the rejection is harvested into the schema's errors (no silent truncation). Verified conformance-neutral over the full W3C XSTS corpus (all four buckets unchanged), the libxml2 determinism differential unchanged, and the full suite; an adversarial critic found the derivation-chain gap, which this fixes with the same counter.
Mihaela Mihaljevic
3e4ca0cce3