Re: Standard schema or format for product sheet

Hello Peter,

Thank you for your answer.

I'm working in a telescope dealer company in France. But I think that my 
question is not specific to telescopes and astronomical items. this is 
the case for all technical products, or generally all products (mainly 
durable goods) which are sold over the Internet with E-Commerce 
plateforms, from clothes to toasters.

For many years, I wrote many product sheets about telescopes, 
binoculars, accessories and all those product sheets look the same 
structurally from a product to an other (short description, long 
description, table of specifications and so on). And it could be applied 
to other selling field like clothes, shoes, washing machines or 
perfumes, perhaps with some little adjustment, from a dealer point of view.
So, I'm surprised not to find an XML "standard" for a "dealer" product 
sheet. This is strange because all e-commerce platforms like Magento, 
Prestashop, Wix (open-source) or Amazon, Aliexpress (closed systems) 
organize their product sheets in the same way even in their databases 
(at least for the open source ones).

We have changed our e-business engine four times in my company, to 
adjust our needs and our growth. Everytime, I had to format the product 
sheets differently because the HTML output format for the new platform 
was different (other HTML tags, other HTML attributes...). Reinventing 
the wheel.

So, in my opinion, XML is the best way to build "universal" product 
sheets, due to its flexibility and the possibility to quickly and easily 
convert XML document to another format for web or print purposes. And 
DocBook is the best format I found for now to do that.

Vincent



Le 14/10/2020 à 17:36, Peter Flynn a écrit :
> On 14/10/2020 13:57, Vincent Bouttard wrote:
>> Hi all, I'm currently working in a company which sells technical 
>> products through multiple distribution channels (shop, dealers and 
>> e-shop) and I'm writing most of the product sheets.
>
> Are you able to say in what field of technology this is?
>
>> I would like to know if there is a standard or an existing schema to
>> format a product sheet in XML. I have created my own one few years
>> ago but I'm currently using DocBook to do that. It works fine but if
>> there is a "universal" and wide-used format for product sheet (with
>> schema and XSL/XSL-FO style sheets), I will consider to use it
>> instead of DocBook.
>
> We have done several for individual manufacturers over the years, in 
> several different fields, but they have been bespoke proprietary 
> layouts. I'm not aware of any global standard that covers everything, 
> so if there is one, I'm missing something.
>
> There are certainly standards in specific industries (pharmaceuticals, 
> chemistry, food, and others) with safety-related international 
> standards which mandate many aspects of size, shape, and appearance 
> for data sheets, like the Nutritional Information block on foodstuffs. 
> These are usually mandatory, so it's an offence in law to do it wrong 
> :-)  There is ISO GUIDE 31:2015 "Reference materials" which is not a 
> standard but a guide to how the information can be treated.
>
> There are also design trends over time: what was thought to be a very 
> suitable product sheet in 1970 is possibly very different from what a 
> designer would produce in 2020 (or maybe not — who knows?).
>
> But none of these would reference markup in any way, just appearance 
> AFAIK.
>
> Peter
>
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