XOM API for Processing XML with Java

["Steve Loughran" <steve.loughran AT gmail.com>]

I'm trying to resolve Qnames, and a fun one is when the body of a
message is something like

<something>:Localname</something>

that is, there is no namespace prefix. I'm not entirely sure that is
legitimat, but QNames are silly as it is, I dont want to overturn the
whole of the XSD type system just yet.

Assuming it is legal, and I have code to extract everything before the
prefix, will element.getNamespaceURI("") return something sensible, or
should I treat the :localonly qname as a special case?

what do other people who handle incoming QNames do with such corner
cases as this, or, my favourite ":"?