This is because such a mechanism isn't strictly within the
confines of XSLT, having to do with processing architectures
and not transformations. To standardize a mechanism would
necessarily favor one sort of platform, environment or
framework, so the best a spec can do is make it optional or
leave it out entirely.
Although the XSLT 2.0 spec leaves the semantics of collection URIs
implementation-defined, I think there it is reasonable to expect that
processors working on a hierarchic filestore will be able to map a folder or
directory to a collection URI. The details of how this works may differ
slightly, so you would be well advised to parameterize the collection URI
(by passing it in as a stylesheet parameter), but apart from that caveat, I
think you can hope for a reasonable level of portability using this
mechanism.
Of course, as with document(), there may be cases where it doesn't work -
for example in a browser with no access to client filestore.
Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
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