Ronald Bourret wrote:
>  
> ...
>  
>  Every XML _parser_ must handle namespace scoping. Most applications
>  don't care. For applications, I think it's an issue in only three cases
>  (any others?):
>  
>  1) Moving nodes around and the document uses more than one namespace
>  2) Using QNames in attribute values/PCDATA.
>  3) Serializing documents by hand.

What does "by hand" mean? Serializers need to work with namespaces as
much as parsers do. And that means that most filters do also. Anyhow,
most of the applications I write or work with do one of those things.

>  I suspect this limits the problem to people writing tools. 

Arguably, most serious XML development is around "tools" in the sense of
applications that are namespace-neutral (editors, XML databases,
transformation engines, data binding engines, schema engines etc.). Part
of the way the XML world works is that we XML-heads write these tools
that hide the XML grunge from people who are trying to string together
systems. Each of these "tools" stands in for a hundred or a thousand
hand-coded namespace-specific modules.

>  ... (This is not
>  to minimize the problem. It doesn't look too bad in SAX, where
>  stack-based processing mimics the declarations, but it looks like a real
>  pain in the DOM.)

It's a pain in SAX too, because if you want to write a filter or
something you need to keep track of namespaces yourself. 

 Paul Prescod

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