> My reading of Dave's response was that in Xalan-C the namespace axis 
does
> return all in-scope namespaces, but that you cannot reliably obtain the
> parent element of a namespace node. So rather than accessing the parent 
of
> the namespace node using the parent axis, you need to save it (the 
parent
> element) in a variable. Is that correct?

Yes, that's correct.  You get all of the in-scope namespace nodes, but 
they are not necessarily parented as you would expect.

It's really a DOM-style implementation, and the namespace axis just goes 
up the tree and gathers up the nodes.  So, this breaks when you really on 
generate-id() as a hack to implement node identity, and also in the case, 
where you use the parent axis.  In the first case, there's no work-around, 
while in the second case, there is.

Dave