Talking about compound names

Two possible parts and ways to read them

Names used to be just names In XML 1.0, element names and attribute names only had one part with no references, so talking about them was easy.
The view without namespace-awareness To an XML 1.0 processor without support for namespaces, the names are still names - they just happen to have a colon in the middle. No URIs will be noticed. This is always true of XML 1.0 validation processing. DTDs do not understand namespaces.
Namespace-aware processors see Qualified Names (QNames) Qualified names are element names with an understanding of the prefix-to-URI mapping and the separation of the prefix from the 'local part' of the element name. Processors can rely on the URI for uniqueness, and ignore the prefix entirely, if appropriate to their needs.