Jeni's Musings

I find that I use QNames only for abbreviating the URIs of RDF vocabulary terms, that is, classes and properties. I don’t abbreviate the URIs of the resources I describe. Unlike the vocabulary terms, I rarely have to repeat them many times, so the length of their URIs isn’t much of an issue.

This makes the problem mostly go away, because RDF vocabulary designers are aware of the issues surrounding QNames and pick URIs that can be abbreviated for their classes and properties.

I don’t like your @base proposal, because as you say < and > don’t work well in XML documents, so you’d need different escaping rules, and things quickly become a mess. A nice thing about RDF’s pseudo-QNames is that they can be used almost anywhere without escaping, because they consist of such a limited set of characters.