Talk:XML

XML design principles

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XML design problems

Product group

I've had tremendous trouble trying to figure out how to express Product groups in generic markup. The idea is that all products belong to a product group and that product groups can belong to other product groups. tomatoes are vegeatables, which are food etc.

The idea is to allow the defining of different relationships between product groups, for the uses of describing Product substitutions and Production Flows and other stuff we haven't even thought of yet.

I was aiming at a generic product group-element to make the processing software (Instructional capital) simpler, but I can't get it to work. We could have an generic product group-element that encapsulates group specific data in a more specific element like:

<product_group id=??><food_group id=??>...</food_group></product_group>
<product_group id=??><clothing_group id=??>...</clothing_group></product_group>

Using "ANY"-constraint (can contain any element... or is it even #PCDATA??) can be kind of hazardous for software.. but maybe we just add these specific groups so that each element can contain just one of the available subgroups for this subgroup.

But this would not allow to define variable relationships required to give everyone their say about product substitution and production flow...

I don't know... We need XML-gurus