Automatic XML Namespaces

The XML community has lived with XML namespaces for a decade. They are useful to the point of seeming indispensable, they are ubiquitous, and yet they are at the same time unwieldy and flawed. Namespace declarations can be inconvenient to remember, and errors in them are frequently the source of subtle and hard-to-diagnose errors. From a programming perspective, namespaces provide scope and disambiguation; from a document authoring perspective, namespaces provide headaches. By introducing a single new feature namespace declarations could be simplified and namespace functionality enhanced without losing the existing benefits of namespaces. Let’s talk about making namespace lemonade from namespace lemons.