> The safest, regardless of using XSLT 1 or 2, is to declare in 
> your stylesheet your own prefixes for *all* the namespaces 
> used in the XML, and then prefix *all* element names in your 
> XPath addresses.  Even in XSLT 2 I've found myself tripped up 
> by declaring the default namespace in my stylesheet because 
> of my laziness when dealing with multiple namespaces, so I 
> personally don't use the new declaration.

Not a bad discipline, but I think the xpath-default-namespace attribute can
be a great convenience when you're processing a single input document that
uses a single namespace throughout, and makes it the default namespace.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/