Hi, Seems to be a variety of views here all from including trying to do away with names spaces if we can :-) Certainly no consensus.
My original suggestion was just to have the standard URLs predefined but still use name space names in MXML code. The name space URIs are defined in flex-config.xml so It would be possible to omit them from the code. We would have to specify a default name space name (mx, s etc) but would still have to use name space names when specifying components eg Have to use <mx:List> or <s:List> not <List> Like this perhaps: <namespace> <uri>http://www.apache.org/flex</uri> <manifest>apache-manifest.xml</manifest> <name>a</name> </namespace> <namespace> <uri>library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark</uri> <manifest>spark-manifest.xml</manifest> <name>s</name> </namespace> <namespace> <uri>library://ns.adobe.com/flex/mx</uri> <manifest>mx-manifest.xml</manifest> <name>mx</name> </namespace> The only down side and this may be a big one is that the MXML files would no longer be 100% valid XML. Which may cause some issues for 3rd party tools IDEs etc etc We could take this a step further if we specified an order to look through the standard name spaces ie Apache then Spark then MX ie the order they are listed in the flex-config.xml. My objective here is to make standard MXML code a bit easier for humans to read. Here what some code would look like. You would still need to use some namespace names but not all over the place. <Application> <-- found in Spark (not mx) namespace --> <Declarations> <-- found in fx namesapce --> <PostCodeValidator id="pcv"/> <-- found in apache namespace --> <Declarations> <mx:List id="country" /> <-- Wanted mx one not spark one so needed to specify name space name --> </Application> I don't imagine that the MXML compiler changes would be that hard to make this happen and wouldn't break any existing code or force it to change. Thanks, Justin