XML namespace

XML namespaces provide uniquely named elements and attributes in an XML document.

XML namespaces are defined in a W3C recommendation.

An XML instance may contain element or attribute names from more than one XML vocabulary. If each vocabulary is given a namespace, the ambiguity between identically named elements or attributes can be resolved.

A simple example would be to consider an XML instance that contained references to a customer and an ordered product.

• Both the customer element and the product element could have a child element named id
• References to the id element would therefore be ambiguous
• Placing them in different namespaces resolves the ambiguity

External Links

• XML namespace @ Wikipedia