[saurik]

> So: namespaces are a pain, making it much harder than it should be to just make my xpath work.

Namespaces exist to solve a real-world problem that happens in real-world use cases (SVG embedded in HTML, HTML embedded in RSS). While it would be nice to look at things that are complex and say "it would be less complex for these trivial cases without this feature", in reality there are then common use cases that become more complex or even impossible in the general case, which seems like a very short-sighted benefit. Namespace prefixes are really not that difficult to configure, and once configured XPath makes them very easy to use :/.

[vidarh]

The biggest caveat with namespaces is that most people have never bothered figuring out how they work. The number of applications I've seen that have hardcoded namespace names instead of looking up the namespace uri for example, is horrifying.

[lmm]

Namespace prefixes are not that difficult to configure once you know about them. But if you're just starting with XML, probably because you need to extract some information from a document you've been sent, you don't want to learn the theory of XML, you want to get the data you need out and get on with adding business value. So you find a tutorial, you write an xpath, and it doesn't work. You try removing the foo: prefixes in your xpath, and it still doesn't work. This is not the experience that a technology should give new users. A default of matching ignoring namespaces would not make anything impossible.