Michael Kay wrote:"Namespaces account for a very significant chunk of user difficulties with XML, a great deal of the complexity of specifications like XSD and XSLT, a similar proportion of the complexity of APIs, and a vast amount of the code in implementations of these specs. And they aren't necessary! The world could have managed perfectly well with a convention where the element name <org.w3c.svg> means "in this subtree, I'm using SVG element names"."Michael, you are not serious, are you? Would you suggest that users start to parse names and, depending on whether the name string matches some "convention", infer that something means an apple, rather than a pear?