Every once in a while, someone gets ideas about crossing recipes and computers. Of course, I love the idea. Two common ideas we hear a lot are 1) to put recipes in XML format and do all sorts of wonderful things and 2) that kitchen appliances should be smart and you should be able to feed them recipes and have your food made for you. They're both great ideas, but invariably, people underestimate the work involved ("But it's just a recipe!") and overestimate the usefulness ("It would be so cool!").

Here’s a good response from someone who knows what he’s talking about when it comes to recipes on the web—he’s one of the contributors to the aforementioned RecipeML format and is part of the team responsible for Recipezaar . While I think that recipes as syndicated microcontent could be a good thing, Troy makes some important points here.

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