>> The XML representation of JSON that XSLT  3 and XPath 3.1 define and share
puts those elements into that namespace, like most XML vocabularies use a
namespace.
>
> Wow. That's a shockingly bad choice of namespace URL, as if namespaces
> weren't confusing enough already. Let's take elements that are neither
> XPath nor a function and put them in the xpath-functions namespace.
> Did nobody raise an issue here when the spec was written?
>

Of course it was debated at the time. There was a lot of concern about
proliferation of namespaces and the fact that a minimal stylesheet contained
three lines of useful code plus 25 namespace declarations, all of them totally
unmemorable.

Personally my instinct would be to make this a no-namespace document, which
works well except when you want it schema-validated. There are lots of
trade-offs.

Using globally-unique names for everything leads to a lot of verbosity; the
problem with namespaces is that they don't allow hierarchic scoping, something
you would think we had learned was a good idea well before 1999.

Michael Kay
Saxonica