> And even if I was, the SOAP toolkit which does this parsing 
> may or may not respect it and that's not something in my 
> control.  (Mine does, but I obviously make no guarantees about others)

A SOAP toolkit is also not required to allow the user to control how or
where the namespaces are placed in the XML - so insisting that
"namespace definitions should be placed on the innermost element that
they affect" might cause compatibility problems with some SOAP toolkits.

Matthew