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> Why must namespaces be restricted to only scoping element and > attribute > names? That seems to me to be unnecessarily restrictive. > Other artifacts > need name-scoping mechanisms, as well, and I don't see why we > should force > them to find another means of accomplishing this. I think the problem is (a) that a document that uses QNames in content is dependent on the namespace prefixes, and (b) that this dependency isn't explicit. The result of this is that when a processor (e.g. an XSLT processor) copies an element to a new place, it has to copy all the in-scope namespace nodes, because it has no way of knowing which of the namespace nodes are actually needed. XSLT has an explicit mechanism, exclude-result-prefixes, to allow users to declare that some of the in-scope namespaces for a literal result element in the stylesheet are not needed in the result tree. There is no equivalent mechanism to exclude namespaces when copying from the source tree. Perhaps we need variant namespace declarations xmlNS="uri" and xmlNS:prefix="uri" that declare namespaces that will only be used in element and attribute names: this would mean these namespaces don't need to be copied if they aren't needed, and it would mean the prefixes can safely be changed when copying. Mike Kay
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