At some point, it may come to pass, that the world will admit, that XML
is not about serializing text.

...

Or, perhaps, that, of the things serialized, text is but a special case.
And that the standards, even as they now stand, demand various
additional first-class value domains. As reluctant as they are to admit
it. For example, for QNames. And form XPaths
("http://www.w3.org/TR/xpath#node-tests"). Perhaps in the age of schemas
the "info-model" will be liberated from its "poor step child" status and
people will look back and ask "what were we thinking?"

David Megginson wrote:
>  
>  ...
>  and there's no way to tell except through the relatively expensive
>  path of consulting a schema.  While it's annoying for typists, it's
>  generally a lot more robust to have
>  
>    <doc:doc xmlns:doc="http://www.acme.com/doc/">
>     <doc:thing1 foo="http://www.acme.com/doc/x" bar="doc:y"/>
>    </doc:doc>
>  
>  At least now I can tell what's meant without a schema.

On the other hand, if the denoted "information item" is, in fact,
intended to be a qualified name, then the problem is just shifted to
recognizing, implementing, and enforcing a second standard serialization
for such things.

...

Can someone tell me if I will ever be able to robustly encode an XPath
which includes an attribute test on a QName node, without knowing the
target documents prefix-bindings-of-the-moment? I, for one, yearn for
better guarantees that a given link will survive the rigours of
cut-and-past or dynamic document generation, than  that the
"implentations are coming along".

...


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