“…The focus is on analysis of the variational problem that is written in a mixed formulation and ledas to new stability and approximation results. To improve the rate of convergence in particular norms, we will use the concept of optimal norm, see e.g., [17,19,21,23,22,26,28,3,4], that provides ε-independent stability. In addition, we will take advantage of the mixed reformulations of the variational problem given by the Saddle Point Least Squares (SPLS) method, as presented in [5,6,7,9].…”