Why were the attributes only set if strip_ns was not set?

I had a document that came out basically empty if I set strip_ns ( the root element came through normally, but all child elements had no key or value in the built out dict() ).

I didn't understand that behavior, and it was not what i needed for my use case.  So, I removed the conditional around setting attributes. 

Not sure if this is the behavior as you want it to be..