No defaut possible namespace ?

I have a working stylesheet with following namespaces:
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" for XSL namespace
xmlns:foo="anyurl" for my own document namespace
I tried to make one of these the default namespace for making the stylesheet 
more readble, however:
-making the XSL namespace fails because of html tag in the stylesheet:
html is not allowed in this position in the stylesheet!
-making my own namespace the default one fails as nothing is recognized 
anymore by the stylesheet ?!
-- 
Guillaume Rousse <rousse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
GPG key http://lis.snv.jussieu.fr/~rousse/gpgkey.html

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