David Megginson has reopened the discussion on how to deal with namespaces in SAX2.

He proposed a helper class to encapsulate James Clark's {URI}localpart notation for namespace-qualified names, with the aim of preserving backwards-compatibility.

Tim Bray objected: "I'm not sure backwards-compatible is really a good idea. The namespace-sensitive and namespace-oblivious views of a chunk of XML are just deeply, totally, massively incompatible, and it seems wrong to try to paper that over. I also don't think it's worth investing any effort at all in accomodating XML documents that use colons in names but aren't namespace-aware, given the explicit warnings against doing this in the XML 1.0 spec."

The debate is providing a lively analysis of the state of the XML world, pre- and post-namespaces.