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