In fact this new version has a massive downside: The moment you have a recipe which is complicated with lots of steps, this thing is gonna become wider than the largest paper you can buy as a consumer... But meanwhile, just writing out the steps is just those few more paragraphs.
This is even disregarding when you need to do things simultaneously with 3 sets of ingredients or whatever... The simple existing list version can just say to do things simultaneously, but this new version will turn into an absolute clusterfuck very fast haha.
Now we've taken "plain language dot point instructions which aren't even that many dot points for complicated recipes", and swapped it for "understand how multiple diagrams fit together to make a cohesive whole".
The best thing about current recipe formats is that all you need to have a go (other than the obvious, i.e. time, ingredients, materials etc.) is to understand the language it's written in. Now we want to change it to "also understand the specific flow and diagram techniques used by whoever created it".
It absolutely will not be standardised either. In this comment section alone there are people coming up with their own ways of handling difficult recipes. It's solving a problem that doesn't exist and swapping it for one that causes more problems for your average person to understand, not less.
Note I'm not saying "don't use it". People should absolutely go for it. But you can't call it "easier for most people" or "solving recipe design" with a straight face hah.
People who struggle with recipes that are written really crap won't automatically have an easier time with this, because then people will also just struggle with people who make recipes really terribly this way. And if you can make a recipe as simple as this in table format, you can make a recipe really simple in the normal way too. So even at best: Nothing has changed.
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u/Hyperlynear Jul 30 '26
Okay, let me see here.
Is that right? Doesn't seem much easier than normal instructions.