This overrides the regular names method which would display the names of the internal fields of an XMLNode object. Since these are intended to be invisible and queried via the accessor methods (xmlName, xmlAttrs, etc.), this should not be a problem. If you really need the names of the fields, use names(unclass(x)).
See Also
xmlApply
xmlSApply
Examples
doc <- xmlTreeParse(system.file("exampleData","mtcars.xml", package="XML")) names(xmlRoot(doc)) r <- xmlRoot(doc) r[names(r)=="variables"]