What Is a Namespace, and Why Do You Need Them?

XML is useful for exchange of documents. A finite number of element type names is available to use to contain the document content. In a global Web, how do we handle the possibility of two element type names being the same? The solution that the W3C chose is namespaces.

Note

A namespace is a collection of names. In XML, a namespace refers to a collection of element type names and attribute names.

So, exactly why do we need namespaces? You might have document fragments such as the following:

<html> 
<head> 
<title>My XHTML document</title> 
</head> 
<body>Some content.</body> 
</html>

and

 <persons> ...

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