, it doesn't mean that every little XML dunmoect needs to be namespaced, if it remains private enough.As for XPath, I consider the difficulties in the use namespaces with XPath to be a weakness in XPath, one that causes me a regular amount of pain. I don't consider it a weakness in the way XML does namespaces. XPath is a convenient nuisance at any time; it's text format is short and convenient, but the fact that it's text and not XML sometimes makes it inconvenient. Not having anywhere to put namespace declarations is one side effect of the textual format. Still, would it be *so* hard to provide an extra parameter somewhere to allow the namespaces to be specified?With XSLT, it becomes a nuisance that there isn't an easy way to pass the namespace prefix to URI mappings into a script. If you could, it would certainly make XSLT transformations more robust with respect to namespace URI changes.Cheers, Tony.