Making the feed document use the default XML namespace

When I wrote about implementing the Atom format, I said that XML processors should not care what namespace prefix we use in the XML. The Feed Validator suggests that some readers might still be confused by this. So I have, somewhat annoyed, elaborated my XML writer to use the default namespace feature.

Before it would generate something starting as follows:

<atom:feed xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <atom:id>urn:uuid:25082a25-c80c-520b-82dc-b36ed5123c3d</atom:id>
  <atom:title>Mismiy build log</atom:title>

This has changed to start like this:

<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
  <id>urn:uuid:25082a25-c80c-520b-82dc-b36ed5123c3d</id>
  <title>Mismiy build log</title>

To a namespace-aware XML processor the two are equivalent. To a processor that attempts to second-guess XML to cope with badly formatted feeds, this might make all the difference.