[2] A DFDL model or schema allows any text or binary data to be read (or "parsed") from its native format and to be presented as an instance of an information set.
The motivations for this approach are to avoid inventing a completely new schema language, and to make it easy to convert general text and binary data, via a DFDL information set, into a corresponding XML document.
A decision was made early on to base the language on a subset of W3C XML Schema, using
DFDL takes this approach and evolves it into an open standard capable of describing many text or binary data formats.
The official OGF Recommendation is now GFD.240 published in February 2021 which obsoletes all prior versions and incorporates all issues noted to date (also available as html).
To additionally model the physical representation of the data stream, DFDL augments the XML schema fragment with annotations on the xs:element and xs:sequence objects, as follows: The property attributes on these DFDL annotations express that the data are represented in an ASCII text format with fields being of variable length and delimited by commas An alternative, more compact syntax is also provided, where DFDL properties are carried as non-native attributes on the XML Schema objects themselves.
The goal of DFDL is to provide a rich modeling language capable of representing any text or binary data format.