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[John Cowan]
>
> Bah. The default namespace is a mere syntactic minimization; it allows
> us to pick any one prefix and eliminate it from the syntax. At the
> Infoset level, prefixes are supplied because of the possible presence
> of QNames in character data, but they aren't *meaningful*.
>
I think of the default namespace a little differently. Imagine that you
have a perfectly good xml document, or schema, and now for some perfectly
good reason you want it to have a namespace. It would be very annoying and
tiresome to go back and apply a namespace prefix to each element, and that
would be likely to break most procesing software that used to work.
So the default namespace allows you to convert a document to having a
namespace with minimal pain and breakage. If you look at it that way, it is
a means for handling legacy markup, and no one has to use it for new work.
Cheers,
Tom P
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