Re: namespace problem with DOM parsed stylesheets

I have a proble in processing stylesheets that have been pre-parsed to DOM trees.
Specifically, think of an xslt portion such as:

1<xsl:stylesheet  xmlns:n = "uri:aNamespace" ...>
 ....
2   <xsl:template match="n:anElement">
       ....
3          <n:anotherElement>
                  ...
4           </n:anotherElement>
       ....
5   </xsl:template>
6 </xsl:stylesheet>

When this is parsed, the prefix information is lost in the DOM tree (or at least is not directly accessible - DOM-2).
When I try to apply this stylesheet (xalan), it complains that "n" is not associate to a namespace in line 2.