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.