A certain amount of namespacing is useful, but the XML model where you can't even write a hello world xpath query until you've set up all your namespaces and us

A certain amount of namespacing is useful, but the XML model where you can't even write a hello world xpath query until you've set up all your namespaces and used them in your query is something that clearly does more harm than good. Java is I think widely recognised as having gone too far on the namespacing front; most post-Java languages have a much less strictly hierarchical namespacing model and I don't think any other package registry has adopted the fully nested style that Maven does. And even Java's heavyweight namespacing is much easier to work with than XML's thanks to things like auto-import in IDEs. I don't think namespaces solve the macro hygiene problem, because if you're going to have macros then they need to be able to interact with and manipulate your namespaces, and sooner or later you need your macro to e.g. generate a fresh identifier for use within an existing namespace and then you're right back where you started. Being able to disambiguate when you have one document including another would be useful. But the cost/benefit on XML-style big namespacing up-front just doesn't stack up.