Workbook on Digital Private Papers > Glossary
Glossary - X
XML Namespace
The elements or tags in XML are not predefined. This may result in name conflicts if one XML document uses element or attribute names from more than one XML vocabulary, which may use the same tag names to denote different types of data. Using XML Namespaces overcomes this problem: if each element can be associated with a particular namespace, ambiguity is avoided. The namespace being used is identified by using the XML Namespace (xmlns) attribute in the start tag of an element. The attribute allows a unique name for the namespace to be recorded as a URI; this may or may not be in the form of a URL linking to a Web page containing information about the namespace. While not required, it is usual practice for each namespace to be defined by a DTD or an XML Schema.
