Why Engineers Don't Write Recipe Books
lettur.com
lettur.com
Modernist Cooking is still a fairly niche tome, even amongst the technorati hobbyist cooks. I actually only stumbled across it a few weeks ago, and I have Food Nerd almost as much as I have Code Nerd.
It's a great book. Tons of analogies that engineers will love.
Engineering is just using quantities, directions, and properties to effect a result.
After college I thought briefly about starting a cookie business. I have a notebook full of detailed cookie experiments. I changed quantities, ingredients, mixing technique, and baking temp/time trying to make the best cookies. My housemates tested the experiment results. Luckily, they were more than pleased most of the time.
Baking is all about chemistry and reactions. The delicious part is just a fantastic side effect.
- cm3 != cm³. Unicode is 20 years old now, no excuses.
- flour is (a) measured by weight, not volume; (b) at most 14% gluten, and that's very high-gluten flour used for bagels and some breads, not cookies.
I fully encourage feeding the trolls with this recipe, however.
It is working out quite nice.
A blog is, by definition, fundamentally text-oriented, as opposed to, say, a vlog (video log) or a podcast, and so should work acceptably well, if not attractively or with all of the intended features, without JavaScript. Ideally, it should degrade gracefully without CSS, too, but that amount of respect for your readers is probably a lost cause.
And it is all about respect for your readers: Books don't demand you read them on a veranda attached to a five-star hotel in New Delhi regardless of how much that would improve the experience. Books are quite happy to be read in a grimy bus terminal in Hoboken, New Jersey, if that's the best the reader can manage. Text-based web pages are quite capable of being read, at an ugly 'bus terminal in Hoboken' level, in browsers like Lynx or Netscape 4 or Internet Explorer 6, and the designer should not presume to demand that their readership have access to first-class tickets booked on Firefox 4 or Chrome 11.
Sometimes this isn't possible. Sometimes, you really do want to put video on the web and people who can't handle video are out of luck. However, you and I both know about the impact open formats and captioning and other measures of respect for the audience can have.
Finally, I could mention the blind tied to screenreaders, but that's insulting both to the technology of screenreader software, which I hear is fairly advanced these days, and to the authors of web pages, who should not need their noses rubbed in the existence of physical limitations simply to be convinced to show basic consideration for their audience.
(Personally, I find a .30-06 at medium range quite suffices.)