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

[Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie>]

On 15/10/2020 08:57, Vincent Bouttard wrote:
> For many years, I wrote many product sheets about telescopes, [...]
> could be applied to other selling field like clothes, shoes, washing
> machines or perfumes, perhaps with some little adjustment

As Gerrit said, most people doing this probably keep the details secret.

> So, I'm surprised not to find an XML "standard" for a "dealer"
> product sheet.
Probably because so few dealers use XML to *store* the data: I suspect 
that the data is stored by manufacturers in their product database, 
possibly even "in XML" (eg a blob of pointy brackets), and dealers get 
whatever format the manufacturer deems sufficient to export.

> This is strange because all e-commerce platforms [...] organize their
> product sheets in the same way even in their databases (at least for
> the open source ones).

I would be very surprised if product sheets were *stored* in databases. 
They would usually be PDFs, generated by some pipeline, from data stored 
in the database. (Although there's no reason why the resulting output 
shouldn't be put into the database as well. I think it would be odd, but 
database people sometimes do odd things :-)

But I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that the product sheets all 
*look* very similar, and that the fields in the databases would also be 
very similar. At some level, everyone has to have Product Number, 
Product Name, etc., the same way that every Article schema has Title, 
Subtitle, Author, etc.

> 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 [...]
Yes, this is very common.

> 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.

I don't think anyone here would disagree with that in concept. For 
technical descriptions, DocBook is by far the most general schema, so in 
the absence of a specialist schema, adapting DocBook looks like a good 
move, as Gerrit described.

UN/CEFACT/EDIFACT, UNECE, and several other organisations do business 
schemas, possibly including product data, but these are *vast* packages 
and probably gross overkill for what you want to do. Right now, anyway.

Peter