>  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


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