> What's it about that URL that
> blesses the functions in my import to work?

It's just a name, like asking why "apply-templates" causes templates to
be applied, the authors of tehe spec could have called it something
else, but the users of the system have to use that exact name.
namespaces are the same, they use URI syntax but they are just an
identifying string, there does not have to be anything retrievable at
that address.

David