Carefully following the discussion from the Amsterdam, where he is attending WWW9, Tim Berners-Lee proposed a transition plan to fix the namespaces URI issue.

The proposal is a compromise based on "absolutized" URIs, leaving room for semantic usages for the namespace URIs, and including a non-normative warning about relative URI usage:

"We can leave XPath and fix its implementations to absolutize. We need to fix the namespace spec to take out the literal comparison wording and just refer to URIs. This will remove the underlying fundamental inconsistency. (I for one had not realized the extent of the inconsistency implied when I reviewed the ns spec) A warning about relative URIs would be motherhood and apple pie but so long as it is non-normative it seems reasonable.

DOM does have to be fixed, so that the base URI is set when the document is created. This is going to save time later, when future layers of DOm implement other URI things such as XLink. And now it will let DOM do the righ thing wiht namespaces.

The public source XML implementations all need to have the absolutize string function clearly available to remove the myths about it needing net access or lots of CPU time."