Re: [docbook] Standard schema or format for product sheet

[Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie>]

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 â who knows?).

But none of these would reference markup in any way, just appearance AFAIK.

Peter