> I'll take a whack at that troll. The SGML-heads tried to make
> namespaces
> global and (IIRC, use a syntax other than attributes). But here's Tim
> Berners-Lee's opinion:
>
> http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Extensible.html#Local
>
It was a nice aim, but it failed miserably, because you can't cut a fragment
out of an XML document and paste it elsewhere without knowing all the
namespace declarations that are in scope for that fragment.
I've just had to throw out a modification made to Saxon by a
well-intentioned user who failed to realise this.
Mike Kay
