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Here's a slightly more "offical" reply from the DOM working group: A serializer may have to fix up prefixes and/or insert additional declarations. We're working on a proposal for a standard way to do that; see DOM Level 3 Core WD for a slightly obsolete sketch of a normalizeNS() method: "This method walks down the tree, starting from this node, and adds namespace declarations where needed so that every namespace being used is properly declared. It also changes or assign prefixes when needed. This effectively makes this node subtree is "namespace wellformed". What the generated prefixes are and/or how prefixes are changed to achieve this is implementation dependent" We are working on an improved version of that sketch, and plan to publish an algorithm that that should make the behavior less implementation-dependent. Meanwhile, anything which produces a document having the correct semantics is, by definition, a correct serialization; if you don't like having the serializer muck with your document, make it all namespace-well-formed _before_ you serialize. That is, add "attributes" (the DOM doesn't yet distinguish attributes from namespace declarations) in the appropriate places to either associate the namespace of the new elements with a prefix, or specify a default namespace. <personal_comment>The root of the problem here is that the various XML-related specs have different conceptions of what namespaces really mean for the information in an XML document. Some treat prefixes as "syntax sugar" (DOM Level 2), some don't (Canonical XML); XPath/XSLT imply that every node has a namespace URI property, whereas the DOM models the syntax more literally and treats namespace declarations as attributes on the elements where they are declared. This really will be straightened out someday (DOM 3 or 4 / XPath 2 ???) ... in the meantime, it takes great care to work with namespaces in applications that employ multiple W3C specs at once, e.g., DOM, Canonical XML, XSLT. </personal_comment>
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