In XML, element names are defined by the developer. This often results in a conflict when trying to mix XML documents from different XML applications. A user or an XML application will not know how to handle these differences. Name conflicts in XML can easily be avoided using a name prefix. When using prefixes in XML, a namespace for the prefix must be defined.The namespace can be defined by an xmlns attribute in the start tag of an element.The namespace declaration has the following syntax. xmlns:prefix="URI".