Introduction to Namespaces

The Internet Explorer 5 XML processor supports the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C ) XML Namespaces Recommendation  specification. With XML namespaces developers can qualify element names uniquely on the Web and thus avoid conflicts between elements with the same name. The association of a Universal Resource Identifier (URI) with a namespace is purely to ensure that two elements with the same name can remain unambiguous; it doesn't matter what, if anything, the URI points to.

Namespace support is integrated into Browsing XML Documents in Internet Explorer 5, Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL), and the XML DOM Reference  programming interfaces. For descriptions of the specific methods that are supported, see the reference topics for the XMLDOMDocument  and XMLDOMNode objects. 

The following topics provide more information on namespaces and describe the namespace support features in Internet Explorer 5:

• Reasons for Namespaces
• Declaring Namespaces
• Object Model Support
• Namespace Scope
• Parsing Support