Data Format Description Language (DFDL) v1.0 Specification
OGF Proposed Recommendation GFD-P-R.174, January 31, 2011


5.1 DFDL Subset of XML Schema

The DFDL subset of XSDL is a general model for hierarchically-nested data. It avoids the XSDL features used to describe the peculiarities of XML as a syntactic textual representation of data, and features that are simply not needed by DFDL.

The following lists detail the similarities and differences between general XSDL and this subset.

DFDL Schemas consist of:

Note: xs:nonNegativeInteger is treated as an unsigned xs:integer.

The following constructs from XML Schema are not used as part of the DFDL Schema Model of DFDL v1.0 schemas; however, they are all reserved2 for future use since the data model may be extended to use them in future versions of DFDL:

1 The purpose of unions is to allow multiple constraints via facets such as multiple independent range restrictions on numbers. This enhances the ability to do rich validation of data.
2 By reserved we mean that conforming DFDL v1.0 implementations MAY NOT assign semantics to them.

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