Why SAX needs namespace support

[james anderson]

As long as names are modeled in the DOM in their universal form, then is
nothing to prevent the DOM from carrying the namespace attributes verbatim.
The only artifact which would ever be required would be to introduce a
namespace attribute for a case where an element contained an identifer
(whether the GI or an attribute name) for the URI of which there was, as a
consequence of a mutation, no lexically apparent binding at the point of
serialization. 

This artifactual attribute could well appear in the serialization only, or it
could actually be interned into the respective element. In the former case,
there is no spec violation: the spec makes no claims about reserialization.

Michael.Kay at icl.com wrote:
> 
> > To put this another way, namespaces are merely a syntactic mechanism
> > to allow each element type and attribute name in a document to be
> > qualified by some URI.  The DOM should obviously preserve this
> > information, but I can't see why it should be concerned with
> > the syntactic sugar that was used to express it. -Tim
> 
> Well one minor technicality is that if it didn't preserve the syntactic
> sugar, it would violate the XML 1.0 spec, which requires that all attribute
> values be available to the application*. This is all part of the general
> problem that namespaces don't work as an optional feature layered above XML:
> they must become core.
>


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