>
> | Way back in the early 2000's, the namespace working group made a
> | decision to allow QNames in data.
>
> Was there ever such a group? I believe it was the much vaunted TAG
> that kosherized socalled qnames in content.
>
> https://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/qnameids
>
That document is (despite the URI) from 2004. QNames-in-content were used in XSLT in 1999 and in XSD in 2001.
The Namespaces in XML spec came from the XML Core working group. As with the XML spec itself, the group chose (in my view unwisely) to define a syntax with no underlying data model. This left other groups to argue later about whether, for example, two documents that differed only in the choice of namespace prefixes should be considered equivalent.
Michael Kay
Saxonica
