Be aware that when you extract a piece of XML from a larger XML document using the readOuterXML() function, it tries to determine the namespaces (as defined in the original XML document) that apply to the new piece, and inserts them into the appropriate tags as xmlns attributes. This can be disconcerting, but it should be a benign alteration in most cases, and I understand that it causes the new chunk of XML to be correctly formatted so it is valid in it's own right.
As far as I'm aware it's not possible to change this behaviour.
