Agreed - I've always wished recipes would have two ingredients lists: one for shopping and one for prep. Like some recipes will call for half a cup of diced onions... So do I buy one onion or two? And recipes that spread ingredient prep throughout the steps make it a pain if you want to prep up front. Having a semantic list of ingredients means you could display them in whichever format is more helpful in the moment.
My other gripe is when recipes tell you to prep 4 tbsp of an ingredient but aren't clear that you only use 3 in an early step and are supposed to save the other 1 tbsp for an end step. Not sure how this could be programmatically solved though
The amounts could just be tied to the steps. So maybe step 2 is to add 3 tbsp of ingredientX, and step 5 is to add 1 tbsp of ingredientX. So programmatically, the ingredients list would be the cumulative amounts of all ingredients described in each step, which would be 4 tbsp ingredientX.
Now that I've tried it, that seems to be exactly how CookLang does it. Though it would be nice if there was a sort of asterisk or note in the ingredients list that indicated the quantity is split between steps
... Or you know I could just learn to read the instructions carefully and not dump the whole bowl of garlic in at once. That'd help too.
My other gripe is when recipes tell you to prep 4 tbsp of an ingredient but aren't clear that you only use 3 in an early step and are supposed to save the other 1 tbsp for an end step. Not sure how this could be programmatically solved though