What is an xs:NCName type and when should it be used?

Question

I ran one of my xml files through a schema generator and everything generated was what was expected, with the exception of one node:

Answer 1

NCName is non-colonized name e.g. "name". Compared to QName which is qualified name e.g. "ns:name". If your names are not supposed to be qualified by different namespaces, then they are NCNames.

xs:string puts no restrictions on your names at all, but xs:NCName basically disallows ":" to appear in the string.