Saxon

Legacy ID: #5036827 Legacy Poster: Michael Kay (mhkay)

In XQuery, as in XML namespaces 1.1, declare namespace n = ''; does not associate prefix "n" with the null namespace, rather it undeclares the prefix "n" so that it is no longer associated with anything. Which is why any attempt to use "n" therefore gives a message saying the prefix is undeclared. See XQuery 1.0 section 4.12: If the URILiteral part of a namespace declaration is a zero-length string, any existing namespace binding for the given prefix is removed from the statically known namespaces. If you want to refer to names in the "null namespace", the only way to do it is by using an unprefixed name, and by not declaring any default namespace. That can be a bit of a pain if your input is in a namespace and your output isn't, or vice versa, which is why XSLT 2.0 introduced the idea of having different default namespaces for the input and output. Unfortunately XQuery didn't go the same way. Michael Kay

Legacy ID: #5036829 Legacy Poster: Michael Kay (mhkay)

"And this works fine in XMLSpy" Altova are sometimes known to do what they think the spec ought to have said. It can be tempting, but it's not in the user's best interests in the long term.