XOM API for Processing XML with Java

[Ed Davies <edavies AT nildram.co.uk>]

The javadoc for Element addNamespaceDeclaration says:

> This is only necessary when prefixes are used in element content and
> attribute values, as in XSLT and the W3C XML Schema Language. Do not 
> use this method to declare prefixes for element and attribute names.

I have a strong urge to use this method to declare a namespace on an
element when the namespace will not be used by that element itself.  It
will, however, be used on a large number of attributes of contained
elements.  The advantage of declaration on the top level element is
simply compactness of the file - avoiding duplication of the namespace
declaration on each of the child elements.

The particular case I have is the generation of SVG documents where
I want to add annotations to the SVG drawing elements indicating
which objects in my data model they are associated with.  Avoiding
the repeated namespace declaration saves about 25% on the file size.

Obviously, it shouldn't make any difference to the meaning of the
file (as there is no use of QNames in content here).

Am I right to ignore the advice quoted above or is there a better
way to achieve this effect?

Ed.