Posted by Steve Driessens on October 28, 1998 at 22:12:37:
G'day all,
The discussion on George hosting a database of recipes on this site prompted this particular post. See 'Database of Commercial Recipes Project.
As a developer of recipe management software one of the things that concerns me (and, I assume most end users of these products) is the simple transfer of data between different, sometimes competing, recipe management programs.
At the moment end-users of recipe management programs are at the mercy of developers as to what format their recipe data is stored in and how the user can import/export data to/from the particular program that they use.
For instance if you are running program A, you generally won't be able to exchange recipes with someone running program B. Personally, I think you should be able to do this at will. Until recenty its been up to the developers of these products to implement import/export facilities with their competitor's products.
Also, anybody hosting a recipe database on a web site is faced with the quandry of what format to make those recipes available in for subsequent download.
Anyway, to the point (eventually!). What's we all need is a standardized way of packaging recipe data that can be easily transferred between different applications and/or web sites.
One possible solution to this problem is Extensible Markup Language (XML). XML is still in its infancy but looks like being an eminently suitable way to handle the recipe transfer problem.
For the uninitiated, XML files package information into text files in such a manner that the file's internal format can be fairly easily interpreted by different programs.
If you're interested, there's heaps of information about XML at:-
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Peaks/5957/xml.html
http://www.xml.com/
http://www.microsoft.com/xml/
One of the many thing about XML that appeals to me as a software developer, is that XML is an open standard, that is no corporate body 'owns' it and hence, XML's future is not at the mercy of any particular company's policy.
What I'm wondering is, are there any other recipe management software developers out there wising to get together together to discuss XML's application to recipe management?
What I have in mind is to get some sort of group together to establish a standard of sorts for packaging recipes in XML files. I.e. standardizing entity names and types to make developing XML aware applications a little easier.
Feedback from recipe management software users would also be valuable to the discussion.
Sorry about the length of this post, but I think its an important subject that effects everybody associated with recipe management software (programmer or end-user).
Any takers out there?
Regards,
Steve Driessens