[dfdl-wg] alternate syntax for DFDL annotations

[Mike Beckerle]

Up til now we've considered DFDL annotations only as inside the appinfo
context. However, we should consider whether we should use non-native
attributes as well or

as an alternative: E.g., simple DFDL rep properties could also be expressed
like this:

    <xs:element name="foo" 

                type="xs:string"

                dfdl:repType="text" 

                dfdl:charset="UTF-8" 

                dfdl:repLength="10"/>

 

This has the advantages of compactness, and is a fully supported way of
extending XML Schema. That is, using non-native attributes is a supported
extension idiom. This won't handle things that really need the syntactic
support of element structure to express their complexity, e.g., things like
specifying text delimiters with quoting and escape-sequence specifications.
For those we'll still need to open an appinfo annotation up. However, for
basic things like byteOrder and such it is far more attractive syntactically
to use non-native attributes than appinfo annotations.

 
Comments?
 
...mikeb 
 
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