[xienze]

Care to elaborate? Pretty much every programming language has the concept of "packages", "prefixes", or "namespaces" to logically group components, functions, etc. together. It's only natural to have the same thing in a document format that can contain heterogeneous document types...

[bungle]

Maybe I bring you James Clark (technical lead for XML, among others): http://blog.jclark.com/2010/01/xml-namespaces.html

Namespaces in XML is a foot shooting feature. Sure it has its uses, but still a misfeature.