<feed xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom' xml:lang='en'/>The only practical difference is that the second serialization is several characters shorter. If we were to recast our entire sample feed with a ns0: prefix in every start and end tag, it would add 4 characters per start tag × 79 tags + 4 characters for the namespace declaration itself, for a total of 316 characters. Assuming UTF-8 encoding, that’s 316 extra bytes. (After gzipping, the difference drops to 21 bytes, but still, 21 bytes is 21 bytes.) Maybe that doesn’t matter to you, but for something like an Atom feed, which may be downloaded several thousand times whenever it changes, saving a few bytes per request can quickly add up.
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The only practical difference is that the second serialization is several characters shorter. If we were to recast our entire sample feed with a ns0: prefix in every start and end tag, it would add 4 characters per start tag × 79 tags + 4 characters for the namespace declaration itself, for a total of 320 characters. Assuming UTF-8 encoding, that’s 320 extra bytes. (After gzipping, the difference drops to 21 bytes, but still, 21 bytes is 21 bytes.) Maybe that doesn’t matter to you, but for something like an Atom feed, which may be downloaded several thousand times whenever it changes, saving a few bytes per request can quickly add up.
The built-in ElementTree library does not offer this fine-grained control over serializing namespaced elements, but lxml does.