php5: ext/dom: unused namespace-definitions

hello, i have a short question about namespaces again. if i have a document like: <?xml version="1.0"?> <prefix:element xmlns:prefix="namespaceUri" xmlns:unusedPrefix="unusedNamespaceURI"> <!-- nothing --> </prefix:element> you can see that there is no element making use of the namespace "unusedNamespaceURI". passing this data to any doc->loadXML($data) method, the loadXML function will remove the unused "xmlns:unusedPrefix" definition from the node. this causes problems in my programm... is there a possibility to prevent the function from removing unused namespaces?! Think about the following scenario (my programm is about the same), where the removement of the xmlns declarations causes into unexpected trouble: in XSL document it is possible to match templates to elements on any namespace, the following example demonstrates this fact: ... <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"> ... <xsl:template match="prefix:element" xmlns:prefix="namespaceUri"> will be applied for prefix'ed elements </xsl:template> ... </xsl:stylesheet> if you load this data into a document (as it is the 'normal' case on transforming any data with DOM), the xmlns:prefix definition will be removed as i mentioned on the top and thus the transformation could not be executed. trying to use the match as an xpath expression you will get an error like 'undefined namespace-prefix "prefix"'... the error wouldn't appear if you define any element using the namespace: ... <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"> <prefix:namespaceOrWhatEver xmlns:prefix="namespaceUri"/> ... <xsl:template match="prefix:element" xmlns:prefix="namespaceUri"> will be applied for prefix'ed elements </xsl:template> ... </xsl:stylesheet> I think this example shows a real case scenario - the possiblity to prevent the load functions from "optimizing" the dom-tree like this would be helpfull. any comments are appreciated. vivian