purpose for living
Corey Edwards
here to rain on anybody's parade. I just feel we ought to ask ourselves
the tough questions first, before anybody else has a chance.
1. What's our scope? Are we writing a schema? Are we coding a recipe
program?
2. What's wrong with what's out there? I've only taken a cursory glance
at some of the options. I waded through the XML schema for krecipe and
it seems quite ad-hoc. I know the data format for the program I toyed
with starting was extremely so. What about RecipeML? What are its
specific failings.
3. Who's going to listen to us? Are we trying to convince recipe
software writers to use our format instead of whatever they now use? Is
it simply for interchange? How do we con them into using our format? OSS
applications I can see, we can just write the code ourselves if need be.
But are we planning to get commercial software vendors on board as well?
Hope that's enough to chew on. I'll sleep on it and come up with some
more. :)
Corey
Joseph Hall
> 1. What's our scope? Are we writing a schema? Are we coding a recipe
> program?
My personal goal is to create a recipe storage format that I can use
either in my own software, or to import and export between other
software. When it comes down to it, functionality is far more
important to me than simplicity. While the goal of the group is not to
write a recipe program per se, I will certainly be writing one myself,
and I hope that others that have considered it in the past will be
encouraged to do so as well.
> 2. What's wrong with what's out there? I've only taken a cursory glance
> at some of the options. I waded through the XML schema for krecipe and
> it seems quite ad-hoc. I know the data format for the program I toyed
> with starting was extremely so. What about RecipeML? What are its
> specific failings.
XML is really chatty. Despite that, it could suit my needs, were a
complete enough schema created. RecipeML is not complete. Several of
the functions mentioned in my rough notes are not present.
Additionally, as near as I can tell, RecipeML has not been updated in
5 years. If there was still active development, I would be much more
encouraged to use it.
> 3. Who's going to listen to us? Are we trying to convince recipe
> software writers to use our format instead of whatever they now use? Is
> it simply for interchange? How do we con them into using our format? OSS
> applications I can see, we can just write the code ourselves if need be.
> But are we planning to get commercial software vendors on board as well?
If we do it wrong, nobody will listen to us for long. If we end up
needing to actually con them into using it, than we will have done it
wrong. My hope is that somebody writing a piece of kitchen software
will approach our efforts and know that we have considered things
carefully, based on the work not only of dedicated programmers but
also of experienced chefs.
> Hope that's enough to chew on. I'll sleep on it and come up with some
> more. :)
Please do. If we don't ask the hard questions now, they'll just get
harder when we do end up asking them.
--
Joseph