Jeni's Musings

A lot of people run into problems with namespaces, and most of those arise from using default namespaces (ie not giving namespaces prefixes). The transformation technology you use can have a big effect on how confusing and irritating it gets.

Default namespaces make XML documents easier to read because they allow you to just give the local name of an element rather than using prefixes all over the place. For example, using:

<house status="For Sale" xmlns="http://www.example.com/ns/house">
  <askingPrice>...</askingPrice>
  <address>...</address>
  <layout>...</layout>
</house>