XML namespaces are used for providing uniquely named elements and attributes in an XML document. They are defined in a W3C recommendation. An XML instance may contain element or attribute names from more than one XML vocabulary. If each vocabulary is given a namespace, the ambiguity between identically named elements or attributes can be resolved.
Yupp, that didn't help me much.
A namespace name is a uniform resource identifier (URI). Typically, the URI chosen for the namespace of a given XML vocabulary describes a resource under the control of the author or organization defining the vocabulary, such as a URL for the author's Web server. However, the namespace specification does not require nor suggest that the namespace URI be used to retrieve information; it is simply treated by an XML parser as a string. For example, the document at http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml itself does not contain any code. It simply describes the XHTML namespace to human readers.
F0r real? Is the explanation within reach?!
XML namespaces provide a simple method for qualifying element and attribute names used in Extensible Markup Language documents by associating them with namespaces identified by URI references.
Soooo....
We envision applications of Extensible Markup Language (XML) where a single XML document may contain elements and attributes (here referred to as a "markup vocabulary") that are defined for and used by multiple software modules. One motivation for this is modularity: if such a markup vocabulary exists which is well-understood and for which there is useful software available, it is better to re-use this markup rather than re-invent it.
Such documents, containing multiple markup vocabularies, pose problems of recognition and collision. Software modules need to be able to recognize the elements and attributes which they are designed to process, even in the face of "collisions" occurring when markup intended for some other software package uses the same element name or attribute name.
These considerations require that document constructs should have names constructed so as to avoid clashes between names from different markup vocabularies. This specification describes a mechanism, XML namespaces, which accomplishes this by assigning expanded names to elements and attributes.
Yeah, uhuh...
In XML documents which conform to this specification, element and attribute names MUST match the production for QName and MUST satisfy the "Namespace Constraints". All other tokens in the document which are REQUIRED, for XML 1.0 well-formedness, to match the XML production for Name MUST match this specification's production for NCName.
Sounds... important. W3C and Wikipedia couldn't answer my wonder, so I kept searching...
I found a post by Elliotte Rusty Harold. Add an xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" attribute to every html element
he says. Why? I wonder.
XSLT and other XML-based tools can treat the same element differently, depending on its namespace. XML-based XHTML tools expect to find HTML elements in the XHTML namespace and will usually not function correctly if they are in no namespace instead.
Furthermore, many browser extensions such as XForms, SVG, and MathML operate correctly only when embedded inside a properly namespaced XHTML document.
And I'm still wondering! I probably need to know more than HTML & XHTML to understand what this is all about. SGML? XML? How deep do I need to dive? Or maybe, somewhere, there is someone who can explain in an understandable human language what the XHTML Namespace really is. If I find out I'll let you no.