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 cc 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> http://www.winterdom.com/dev/bts/BTSFFSchemaTut2.html