Naive Question about NS 1.1

I think I'm misunderstanding something, can anyone point 
where my train of thought is being derailed:

- The Infoset defines that the namespace information items 
for an element are all those that are in scope. i.e. defined 
on this element or it's ancestors.

- This leads to bleeding of namespaces from ancestors causing 
the problems cited in the NS 1.1 Reqs. w.r.t SOAP/XQuery

- This leads to revising the namespace spec to allow undeclaring of 
namespaces, alleviating the issues in the other specifications.

Why let changes ripple out like this? Why can't the infoset definitions be 
changed? Why does an element need namespace information items?

I'm sure there's a good reason, I'm just not sure what it is.

Cheers,

L.

-- 
Leigh Dodds, Research Group, Ingenta | "Pluralitas non est ponenda
http://weblogs.userland.com/eclectic |    sine necessitate"
http://www.xml.com/pub/xmldeviant    |     -- William of Ockham