Yup. I thought the same thing. Philosophically all very similar. Different in all the details.

Like the IBM system it's quite machine-centric. I think we're shooting for a notch more human-intelligibility in the DFDL-WG currently.

However, I'm a bit biased to NOT reach out to Microsoft and twist their arm for participation in our WG just yet. Not until we've made a bit more progress. We're really cranking on a prototype here at Ascential and I want to avoid distractions currently.

...mikeb

From: Suman Kalia [mailto:kalia@ca.ibm.com]
Sent: Friday, January 28, 2005 9:30 AM
To: mike.beckerle@ascentialsoftware.com
Cc: dfdl-wg@gridforum.org
Subject: Fw: [dfdl-wg] Microsoft Biztalk Flat File Extensions

Mike -- This seems quite similar to the proposal I submited based on Type Descriptor. They have a schema for the physical representation and the instances of which (eg. recordInfo, fieldInfo etc) appear as annotations on schema elements , attributes etc.

Suman Kalia
IBM Toronto Lab
WebSphere Business Integration Application Connectivity Tools
Tel : 905-413-3923 T/L 969-3923
Fax : 905-413-4850
Internet ID : kalia@ca.ibm.com
----- Forwarded by Suman Kalia/Toronto/IBM on 01/28/2005 09:20 AM -----

mike.beckerle@ascentialsoftware.com
Sent by: owner-dfdl-wg@ggf.org
01/28/2005 04:36 AM

To
dfdl-wg@gridforum.org

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Subject
[dfdl-wg] Microsoft Biztalk Flat File Extensions

Microsoft has a completely proprietary but otherwise DFDL-like thing in its bag of tricks too:

see
http://www.winterdom.com/dev/bts/BTSFFSchemaTut2.html