| Microsoft XML Core Services (MSXML) 5.0 for Microsoft Office - XML Developer's Guide |  |
Using Namespaces in Documents
Microsoft XML Core Services (MSXML) 5.0 for Microsoft Office supports the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Namespaces in XML Recommendation specification. By using XML namespaces to qualify element names, you can avoid naming conflicts for elements that have the same name. Associating a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) with a namespace ensures that only elements with the same name remain unambiguous.
Namespace support is integrated into the MSXML parser, including the Document Object Model (DOM), Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL), XML Data Reduced (XDR) schemas, and XML schemas (XSD).
The following topics provide more information about namespaces, and describe the namespace support features in MSXML.
Other Resources 
W3C Namespaces in XML Recommendation