Dark fluid is not analyzed like a standard fluid mechanics model, because the complete equations in fluid mechanics are as of yet too difficult to solve. A formalized fluid mechanical approach, like the generalized Chaplygin gas model, would be an ideal method for modeling dark fluid, but it currently requires too many observational data points for the computations to be feasible, and not enough data points are available to cosmologists. A simplification step was undertaken by modeling the hypothesis through scalar field models instead, as is done in other alternative approaches to dark energy and dark matter.