An early consideration was what input the processor should be expected to handle when validating. The text of the standard speaks about "an XML document" (Clause 1, Scope) and refers to "the instance document" in several places. The fact that the text is written in this way does not explicitly preclude batch processing or multiple context items, but Schematron was clearly conceived of initially as a validator consuming a single XML document as input. By contrast, using XQuery means we have its in-built facility to address a corpus of multiple documents, such as may be stored in a database or on a file system.

XQS adheres to the strict interpretation of the standard for now: the input is expected to be a single document node. This is in line with the other QLBs, but there may be a case for specifying the XQuery binding to allow multiple input documents, e.g. as returned by a call to collection().