Great.

Thanks for the response, best explanation I've heard yet.

Kev

>Hi Kevin,
>
>Sorry for being so late...
>
>XML Namespaces use URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) to define their names. This means you can use any valid URI to name your namespaces. As URLs are also URIs, lots of XML documents will use URLs to define namespaces. W3C standards traditionally use URLs in their namespaces, so you will find namespaces named like "http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" in various situations.
>
>Anyway this doesn't mean that these URLs need to be acessible or valid at all. Think of these URLs just as ordinary names that can identify uniquely a namespace from the others. As domain names are supposed to be unique, companies defining namespaces choose to use URLs to define their namespaces in order to guarantee uniqueness. W3C can guarantee that will be no other "http://www.w3.org/" in the world comming from other company or institution.
>
>So, the short answer is NO, you don't need to be connected to the Internet to use any XML document that defines XML Namespaces.
>
>Regards,