Ignoring other attributes in data formats without namespaces is not as easy. What if one language is embedded in another and each one has a title element?
I do not know why you “feel” that way about the middle you want to exclude. It has been proven to be very useful in practice for me. Also without it, XML would not have the “extensible” property.
The way you describe working with “XHTML-with-embedded-SVG” reads to me like there is something about namespaces or your toolchain that you have difficulties with. I found that with XML-based systems, especially XSLT, it is easy to make a task needlessly complicated if one does not understand the details.
I do not know why you “feel” that way about the middle you want to exclude. It has been proven to be very useful in practice for me. Also without it, XML would not have the “extensible” property.
The way you describe working with “XHTML-with-embedded-SVG” reads to me like there is something about namespaces or your toolchain that you have difficulties with. I found that with XML-based systems, especially XSLT, it is easy to make a task needlessly complicated if one does not understand the details.