I have thought for a long time that it would be a good idea to allow such a
notation (a) in source XML, (b) in XPath expressions, and (c) in the lexical
space of the xs:QName data type; but I haven't had much success in
persuading anyone. 

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joe Fawcett [mailto:joefawcett@xxxxxxxxxxx] 
> Sent: 02 October 2005 19:08
> To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject:  Clark notation in XPath
> 
> Dear All
> 
> I was talking to someone at Microsoft last week about greater 
> adoption of XML in 
> general and some of the things people struggle with.
> 
> One idea was to allow Clark notation when doing searches on 
> documents as 
> developers seem to struggle with the idea that that don't 
> need to know the 
> actual prefix used in a document.
> 
> Let's say I have in memory a document that has all elements in the 
> http://myDomain.co.uk/namespaces/ns1 namespace.
> I can select an element using the xpath:
> 
> MyDom.select("{http://myDomain.co.uk/namespaces/ns1}myElement")
> 
> Of course this is not standard but I'm sure similar ideas 
> have been mooted in 
> the past so I'd appreciate your comments.
> 
> Joe