What is meant by namespaced content and what advantages does it have?

Question

I was reading this blog by James Bennett regarding HTML vs XHTML . He writes :

I don’t have any need for namespaced content; I’m not displaying any complex mathematical notation here and don’t plan to, and I don’t use SVG for any images. So that’s one advantage of XHTML out the window. I also don’t have any need for XML tools; all the processing I need to do can be handled by HTML-parsing libraries like BeautifulSoup. That’s the other advantage gone.

What does he mean by namespaced content and what advantage does it provide us ?

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML_namespace – yannis Oct 29 '12 at 11:33 — yannis, Oct 29 '12 at 11:33

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 29 '12 at 12:25

XML namespaces allow including XML elements defined in a schema other than that of the main document. Specifically, the article talks about MathML and SVG, which are XML-based formats that can be directly embedded in an XHTML document using namespaces, looking like this:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
      xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML">
  XHTML content goes here
  <m:math>
      MathML content goes here
  </m:math>
  more XHTML content
</html>

What is meant by namespaced content and what advantages does it have?

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