I see the point syntactically about the colonized name, and 
if namespaces really stopped at the syntax rather than just 
being silent, it might be an overwhelming point.  I just 
think we are better off putting namespaces as the first thing 
to the right of 1.0, but not in it.  Designing an XML application 
to be incompatible is probably not smart, but XML itself shouldn't 
have to care.

len


From: Elliotte Rusty Harold [mailto:elharo@[...].edu]

Leaving out namespaces does not guarantee global interoperability. It 
actively harms it. It is not that you must use namespaces. You are 
free not to use namespaces if they are not useful to you. That's OK. 
What is not OK, is designing XML in a way that that is incompatible 
with namespaces; e.g. using colonized names without declaring the 
prefixes.  If you designed names-malformed documents, then many 
parsers and process will automatically reject your documents.

Core is, I think, namespace well-formed documents. This includes 
documents that don't use namespaces at all. It does not include 
documents that are incompatible with namespaces.

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