Relative URIs

The recent brouhaha over whether relative URIs should be absolutized brought
to my attention the fact that

1) The namespace recommendation says that the namespace URIs should be
treated as strings
2) The XPath recommendation does not quite do this because it absolutizes
relative URIs.

This raises two questions:

1) How does an XPath implementation know the base URI to do this conversion?
2) Given that XPath came out after Namespaces, are we to assume that Xpath
is in error?

John Boyer
Software Development Manager
PureEdge Solutions Inc. (formerly UWI.Com)
Creating Binding E-Commerce
jboyer@PureEdge.com