I am not doubtful about the usefulness of namespaces.
They are immensely useful.. They help us distinuish
between different XML applications, as Elliotte
pointed. 

Thanks for telling about usage of namespaces in SAX
and DOM.

The discussion topic I started was, "can we treat XML
elements and attributes as sets" still eludes me. I
think they should be treated as sets, as we can
perform useful mathematical operations on XML
documents using set operators. 

Mike said, we should treat sets in the context of XML
and related specs, as unordered. IMHO, that an over
simplification of the issues(this will have 1-to-1
mapping of XML sets to maths sets. but this I think
will miss the requirement of ordered nature of XML
elements). The XML Schema can define elements, with
order, as well as unordered (using the xs:sequence
construct). Which would I think imply that maintaining
and not maintaining order are both important in XML?
Do I make any sense? 

Regards,
Mukul

--- Alan Gutierrez <alan-xml-dev@e...> wrote:
> 
>     In SAX, no namespace, or the default namespace,
> is represented
>     by the empty string. Closer to the set way of
> looking at things.
> 
>     In DOM no namepsace is represented by null.
> 
>     (Another example of how Namespaces can baffle a
> new user.)
> 
> --
> Alan Gutierrez - alan@e...
>     - http://engrm.com/blogometer/index.html
>     - http://engrm.com/blogometer/rss.2.0.xml



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