This is the first of what will hopefully be a long run of articles dedicated to demystifying the subtler aspects of W3C XML technologies supported by Microsoft. Although at its core XML is still fairly simple, the technologies that surround it have become more and more complex and some require considerable expertise to master. The purpose of this article, and the others that will follow is to distill the information in various W3C XML recommendations into easily digestible chunks for XML users and developers to consume.

The first article in this series is about an often misunderstood facet of XML—namespaces. XML namespaces are an integral aspect of most of the W3C's XML recommendations and working drafts, including XPath, XML Schema, XSLT, XQuery, SOAP, RDF, DOM, and XHTML. Understanding how namespaces work and how they interact with a number of other W3C technologies that are dependent on them is important for anyone working with XML to any significant degree.

This article explores the ins and outs of XML namespaces and their ramifications on a number of XML technologies that support namespaces.

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