RE: [xml-dev] The prefix "fgdc" for element "fgdc:fgdc" is not bound

["Michael Kay" <mike@saxonica.com>]

> there was a hope that a given 
> qualified name with a non-null namespace would in fact have 
> some particular use.  So 
> {http://example.org/booknamespace,title} might be the title 
> of a book, regardless of the document in which it appeared; 
> {http://example.org/peoplenamespace,title} might be used for 
> titles like Mr., Ms., etc.  There's clearly no hope for that 
> with unqualified names, since they are clearly used in all 
> sorts of contradictory ways.

Personally, I think it's just as likely that the element name
{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml,meta} will be abused as that the element name
{iso83641-vpn-occupation-code} will be abused. 

(One of the problems with schemas, in fact, is that they encourage tag
abuse, because they limit the freedom of users to invent new element names,
encouraging them instead to overload the semantics of existing names. The
tighter the schema is defined, the more creative users have to become in
getting around them; in the end, they resort to comment-abuse, or even as
I've seen in one case, using a namespace declaration as a boolean flag whose
presence or absence conveyed information to the recipient.)

But none of this really affects the argument. From a purely pragmatic
viewpoint, many statements about names and namespaces would be easier to
utter if the non-namespace were recategorised as an unnamed namespace.

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