DocBook 5.0 Toolchain and Questions

[Ben Rockwood <benr@cuddletech.com>]

I'm alittle confused about what 5.0 and NG will mean to authors moving 
forward.  NG looks like it will make customization much nicer without 
having to bug Bob Stayton (my hero) every time, but from a practical 
standpoint I'm unsure of what the future holds.

Currently, in 4.x it seems to me that the "golden toolchain" is xsltproc 
and DocBook XSL 1.69.1.  I'm not an expert with XML or DocBook 
internals, but it looks to me like 1.69.1 is simply bridging the gap 
betwen DTD and NG, and I guess the word on the street is that in the 
future we'll use DocBook 5.x with XSL2, which I suppose means we can 
continue to use xsltproc?  The classic user problem with DocBook hasn't 
been how to use the markup, so much, as it is how to setup a toolchain 
and actually output documents.

A side question, I won't miss DOCTYPE's so much, but I'm concerned that 
I can't verify the new NG xmlns locations, such as:

<article xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook"; version="lillet">


If I point a browswer to that url to verify that its valid I get a 404.  
Nevertheless, it seems to work fine.  Can someone explain this? 

Thanks,

benr.