[xquery-talk] Collections - family relationships

[Michael Kay]

On 5 Jan 2014, at 16:50, Ihe Onwuka <ihe.onwuka at gmail.com> wrote:

> If x is the document element of a document in a collection, is it the sibling of y that is the document element of another document in the same collection?

No.
> 
> If not why not?

"Why" questions are very difficult to answer. Do you want a historically accurate answer (was the question debated at a WG meeting, who argued which position, how did the vote go, and why did individual members vote as they did?) - because it's very rarely possible to give one. Or do you want a post-hoc justification (can you think of a sensible reason that anyone might have designed it this way?)

One post-hoc justification is that collections are unordered, whereas axes are always ordered.

Another is that documents may belong to more than one collection.

Michael Kay
Saxonica