
Chapter 2. Technologies 25
2.3.3 Namespace
Element names are usually self explanatory, such as <employee>, <phone>, or <amount>. This
of course means that many companies or organizations are using the same element names
but with slightly different meaning or syntax.
To resolve this problem, the XML specification supports
namespaces. A namespace is a
qualifier or prefix to element names and attribute names and makes it unique.
The reserved attribute xmlns is used to declare a namespace, and its attribute value is a
Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). Even though the URI looks similar to a Web site address,
an XML parser does not attempt to get the ...