RE: namespace node implementation

> Unfortunately, XQuery has a few places like that where the compiler 
> needs to carry the compile-time namespace bindings through to the 
> runtime.  It looks like this area of XQuery is still unsettled.

The worst case of this was casting QNames to strings, which will disappear
in the next draft (for this very reason). There are still cases where the
namespace context is needed at run-time, but they are all situations where
you can tell at compile time that you will need the namespace context at
run-time (if you follow me!).

Michael Kay