The XSD any wildcard item is similar to an ASN.1 open type in semantics in that it allows any valid content to be present in that position in an XML document. However, an ASN.1 open type is not used to model an <xsd:any>. Instead, a character string variable is used. This stores the full XML text of the field in native XML form (i.e. angle brackets and the like are not escaped). Note that the XML text is not converted to different form when using binary encoding rules - it is maintained as XML text.