Comment 2 for bug 1915613

Thanks for the report. I don't think there is an easy way to improve this. The interface uses ElementTree's qualified tag names. It's intentional to resolve the prefixes here, in order to make it _easier_ for users to deal with namespaces. There is obviously a loss of parser available data in doing this, but since prefixes are not part of the XML information set, it's not a loss in the document information. Only round-trips suffer from this issue.

So, I do admit that it's an issue. But it seems a very rare issue and it isn't easy to do something about.
Sounds like a "won't fix".