Stefan Behnel <sco...@users.sourceforge.net> added the comment:

There is at least one valid use case: code that needs to deal with HTML and 
XHTML currently has to normalise the tag names in some way, which usually means 
that it will want to remove the namespaces from XHTML documents to make it look 
like plain HTML. It would be nice if the library could do this efficiently 
right in the parser by simply removing all namespace declarations. However, 
this doesn't really apply to (c)ElementTree where the parser does not support 
HTML parsing.

I'm -1 on the interface that the proposed patch adds. The keyword argument name 
and its semantics are badly chosen. A boolean flag will work much better.

The proposed feature will have to be used with great care by users. Code that 
depends on it is very fragile and will fail when an input document uses 
unexpected namespaces, e.g. to embed foreign content, or because it is actually 
written in a different XML language that just happens to have similar local tag 
names. This kind of code is rather hard to fix, as fixing it means that it will 
stop accepting documents that previously passed without problems. Rejecting 
broken input early is a virtue.

All in all, I'm -0.5 on this feature as I'd expect most use cases to be 
premature optimisations with potentially dangerous side effects more than 
anything else.

----------
nosy: +scoder

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue8583>
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