> Thirdly, I think it is very bad of Saxon to have two 
> completely different meaning for the file URI scheme in the 
> collection function (I refer to the catalog and the wild-card 
> forms, both of which have a completely different meaning).

Bad things often happen in the interests of backwards compatibility!

These days I generally try to keep things working for users even when I
decide my first-cut design wasn't perfect. A few of them pay my salary,
after all.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/