I receive, most people who use SAX haven't even read the XML 1.0 REC much less the Namespaces REC, and I wouldn't expect them to have done so. This week's debate centered around the namespaces of attributes. This was essentially the question asked by David Hunter in connection with XSLT processing. These must always be treated as identical. These must always be treated as different.
Applications can make up their minds.
Black and White Marching to the beat of a somewhat simpler drummer is the crowd on the SML-DEV list . Don Park posted a status report of SML to the XML-DEV mailing list, reporting on the group's progress and on some of the more interesting concepts being addressed. I think SML represents a unique opportunity to do things right in the right order. In contrast, an XML information model is still being worked on, two years after XML syntax. After all, SML will be our child.