I'm trying to simply get a listing from a directory on a WebDAV share
using Emacs. I was overjoyed to see that Emacs ships with url-dav.el,
which seemed to do exactly what I needed. However, it seems that url-dav
depends on a specially patched xml.el for namespace expansion which
apparently never made it into Emacs proper. If you look into
`url-dav-supported-p', it looks for a function `xml-expand-namespace'
which I cannot find anywhere in xml.el's history. At least one other
lone soul faced the same problem and came to the same conclusion (see
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-gnu-emacs/2011-11/msg00158.html).

Now, xml.el can properly deal with namespaces since 2004 or so, but it
returns the QNames through a cons ("DAV:" . "property"), which is kind
of... cumbersome. The url-dav package naturally expects a plain symbol
'DAV:property.

I started rewriting url-dav to work with the cons's returned by xml.el,
but it's tedious work and, more importantly, makes the code really
ugly. Instead, I now just use a small function to replace the cons's in
xml.el's output with the plain symbols the package expects. Please find
the patch attached.

-David