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Some of the software lists contain a large number of items covering various types of software, ie. games, utilities, educational, coverdisks, etc. which can add alot of uninteresting items to navigate if you're looking for a specific game.

I'm not suggesting a genre tag, which can be subjective, but instead how about an optional <softwaregroup name="Games"> between softwarelist and software items. This would allow grouping software by type. I know some of my bbc softlists would benefit from this, and I could merge my various bbc_flop_xxx lists if they were grouped in bbcb_flop.

It would add a single level of navigation in the UI and frontends such as QMC2 could allow collapse/expand of the groups.

Would this be much effort and acceptable if I looked into it?

I don't think this really requires a new XML tag; <info> should be adaptable for this purpose.

Sure, but the <info> tag is not really used by the internal UI, just contains extra info for any frontends that care to use it. And adding a <info name="group" value="Games" /> to every entry is more like specifying a genre which is not my intention.

I'm not understanding this request. You suggest games, utilities, educational, and coverdisks to differentiate pieces of software, but those *are* genres.

And if we decided to use <info> for this purpose, obviously the internal UI would start using it.

I'm thinking them more as categories/groups than genres. Just would like some way of grouping large number of entries in existing softlists. See c64_flop is already grouped into Games, Compilations, Applications, Educational, etc. but the UI has no way of knowing this to aid navigation.

The <info> tag could be used but would require every single item in a list be updated with the tag, and could be easily abused by making them all different which would hinder navigation.

This could also be useful in the psx and saturn lists to group titles by region. The saturn titles would be grouped Japan, USA, Europe (not genres) which would definitely aid navigation.

Just use different software lists for those. system_flop_games.xml, system_flop_applications.xml, etc. You can select the list in the built-in UI then.

Some form of tagging where multiple tags can be assigned to a piece of software should cover most of this.

no please, no splitting by genre in list. any such a split would be highly arbitrary (for example
it's highly debatable where the line has to be drawn between some edutainment and some games) and we shall stick to objective documentation in both source and software lists. the separation inside the xml is just for make simpler later updates.

genres should be dealt by external datfiles.