Dear Sirs, It is driving me nuts. You see all the basex examples here on Debian, only have simple examples, with no NAMESPACES involved. However, http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/playlists/1ADE82BB5C96D594?prettyprint=tr... is the kind of data I am trying to deal with. Yes, you could say just do $ sed '2s/.*/<feed>/' and strip the namespaces. Ha ha ha. Well I did. And then there is media:* how do I deal with that. sed s/:// ? So instead I tried to look up how do declare namespaces. But I could never mind. Here's my makefile N=\ declare namespace atom='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom';\ declare namespace app='http://purl.org/atom/app#';\ declare namespace media='http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/';\ declare namespace openSearch='http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearchrss/1.0/';\ declare namespace gd='http://schemas.google.com/g/2005';\ declare namespace gml='http://www.opengis.net/gml';\ declare namespace yt='http://gdata.youtube.com/schemas/2007';\ declare namespace georss='http://www.georss.org/georss'; F=1ADE82BB5C96D594?prettyprint=true P=http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/playlists/$F s1:;basex -Vc "OPEN input; XQUERY $N " strippedF:$F;sed '2s/.*/<feed>/' $? |basex -Vc "CREATE DB input /dev/stdin; XQUERY /" xm:$F;basex -Vc "OPEN input; XQUERY (: xmlns:atom='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom':) /*:feed" 1m:$F;basex -c "OPEN input; XQUERY declare copy-namespaces no-preserve,inherit;//*[local-name()='thumbnail']"|sed q edwm:$F;basex -Vc "OPEN input; XQUERY declare default element namespace 'ccc';//*[local-name()='thumbnail']" wm:$F;basex -Vc "OPEN input; XQUERY /*[local-name()='feed']/*[local-name()='entry']" m:$F;basex -Vc "OPEN input; XQUERY data(/*:feed/*:entry/*:id)"|tr ' ' \\n m1:$F;basex -Vc "OPEN input; XQUERY /*:feed" c:$F;basex -Vc "OPEN input; XQUERY data(//*:name)[1]" c1:$F;basex -Vc "OPEN input; XQUERY (//*:name)[1]" b:$F;basex -Vc "CREATE DB input $?; XQUERY /" My question: is it possible to use basex reasonably here shedding it of all the namespace baggage that I can not deal with. Thanks.