[XML4Lib] MODS default namespace issue

[Andrew Ashton]

Hi, 
 
I'm going to delurk for a moment to vent & ask a question.  I've been
working with doing some MARCXML->MODS transforms and then doing some
further XSLT on the MODS records.  I have tried transforming the MARC
data using both SIMILE's nifty RDFizer tool [1] and LoC's MARC2MODS
stylesheets [2] via Xalan.  In both cases, the Xalan transformations
fail to match any elements, even with the simplest "Hello World"-type
effort.  It appears that both of these tools set a default, unqualified
namespace of xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3" in the <modsCollection>
root element.  Altering the output to qualify the namespace as
xmlns:mods="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3" makes it work correctly.
 
My questions are: Is this still valid MODS?  I had the impression that
using default namespaces like that were bad form, and Xalan is just
being a stickler for specificity - is this impression correct?  And
finally, is there any way to circumvent this problem during the Xalan
transformation instead of needing to edit the LoC or SIMILE stylesheets?
 
Thanks!
 
[1]http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/RDFizers
[2]http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/MARC21slim2MODS.xsl
 
--
Andrew Ashton
Systems Librarian
Scribner Library, Skidmore College
(518)580-5505
 
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