XML in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

The Default Template Rule for Namespace Nodes

A similar template rule matches namespace nodes and instructs the processor not to copy any part of the namespace node to the output. This is truly a built-in rule that must be implemented in the XSLT processor’s source code; it can’t even be written down in an XSLT stylesheet because there’s no such thing as an XPath pattern matching a namespace node. That is, there’s no namespace( ) node test in XPath. The XSLT processor inserts any necessary namespace declarations in the output document automatically, without any special assistance from namespace templates.