Question: Why is it better to
statically resolve short names to long names? What are the disadvantages of
dynamically resolving short names to long names? Can you provide a concrete example of where problems arise as a result of having to
dynamically resolve short names to long names?
The main problem is that the XML parser needs to make the namespace context available to any downstream processing that might need it, which greatly complicates APIs (e.g. it creates the need for namespace nodes in the XDM model).
The second (related) problem is that there's a lot of complexity involved in making sure that the namespace context is not lost when subtrees are copied or transformed.
