How do I declare an XML namespace in an XML document?

XML Interview Questions and Answers

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65. How do I declare an XML namespace in an XML document?

To declare an XML namespace, you use an attribute whose name has the form:
xmlns:prefix
--OR--
xmlns
These attributes are often called xmlns attributes and their value is the name of the XML namespace being declared; this is a URI. The first form of the attribute (xmlns:prefix) declares a prefix to be associated with the XML namespace. The second form (xmlns) declares that the specified namespace is the default XML namespace.
For example, the following declares two XML namespaces, named http://www.google.com/ito/addresses and http://www.google.com/ito/servers. The first declaration associates the addr prefix with the http://www.google.com/ito/addresses namespace and the second declaration states that the http://www.google.com/ito/servers namespace is the default XML namespace.
<Department
xmlns:addr="http://www.google.com/ito/addresses"
xmlns="http://www.google.com/ito/servers">
NOTE: Technically, xmlns attributes are not attributes at all -- they are XML namespace declarations that just happen to look like attributes. Unfortunately, they are not treated consistently by the various XML recommendations, which means that you must be careful when writing an XML application.
For example, in the XML Information Set (http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-infoset), xmlns "attributes" do not appear as attribute information items. Instead, they appear as namespace declaration information items. On the other hand, both DOM level 2 and SAX 2.0 treat namespace attributes somewhat ambiguously. In SAX 2.0, an application can instruct the parser to return xmlns "attributes" along with other attributes, or omit them from the list of attributes. Similarly, while DOM level 2 sets namespace information based on xmlns "attributes", it also forces applications to manually add namespace declarations using the same mechanism the application would use to set any other attributes.

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