“xmlns” stands for XML namespaces. It helps us to avoid name conflicts and confusion in XML
documents. For example consider the below two XML which have table elements, one table is a
HTML table and the other represents a restaurant table. Now if both these elements come in a
single XML document there would name conflicts and confusion.
<table> <tr><td>Row1</td></tr> <tr><td>Row2</td></tr> </table>
<table> <cloth>red</cloth> <serve>Tea</serve> </table>
So to avoid the same we can use XML namespaces. You can see in the below XML we have
qualified the HTML table with “h:table” and the restaurant table element qualified with
“r:table”.
<h:table xmlns:h="http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/"> <tr><td>Row1</td></tr> <tr><td>Row2</td></tr> </h:table>
<r:table xmlns:h="http://www.questpond.com/restaurant/table/def"> <cloth>red</cloth> <serve>Tea</serve> </r:table>