> >If this requirement had been foreseen
>
> Surely it was foreseen. QNames in content were first used by
> XPath/XSLT, and the namespaces spec had to be produced in a hurry
> precisely to avoid blocking work on a stylesheet spec.
Yes: QNames are used in patterns in the Dec 1998 draft of XSLT
http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/WD-xsl-19981216
which predates the Namespaces Rec of 14 Jan 1999.
There were of course people on this list who saw that all was not well:
http://mailman.ic.ac.uk/pipermail/xml-dev/1999-January/008386.html
http://mailman.ic.ac.uk/pipermail/xml-dev/1999-February/009516.html
Michael Kay
