This would obviously work, but that would mean every XML application
that uses QNames in content would invent its own mechanism. WSDL too
uses the XSLT style of QNames in attributes as does WSFL, XLANG, ...
It would be really annoying to have to remember each language's
application namespace declaration mechanism, especially when you're
combining two or more of these in some setting (which is quite common).
I think this is an important point. When you have a document that uses
multiple vocabularies, you want to be able to declare the prefixes once
(typically on the root element) and have all the different vocabularies in
the document make use of those declarations. If each application has its
own mechanism, then you would typically have to declare the prefixes
separately for each namespace island in the document.
How about introducing another standard mechanism ala xmlns to
define such parser-unaware namespace?
That might have been a good idea a couple of years ago. At this point,
there are enough important applications that make use of in-scope
namespaces that XML processors mostly have adequate support for this.
James
