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

[Dave Pawson <dave.pawson@gmail.com>]

You might be better asking on the xsl list (mulberrytech) - a more
general xslt list.

HTH

On Thu, 15 Oct 2020 at 08:57, Vincent Bouttard
<vincent.bouttard@optique-unterlinden.com> wrote:
>
> 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 Ã 17:36, Peter Flynn a Ãcrit :
> > 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
> >
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> >
>
>
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-- 
Dave Pawson
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