Introduction to Namespaces

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

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

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

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