[anandgrafiti]

Sorry about that, We took a calculated call with the editor. For the consumer, a structured tabular view of ingredients make sense but for the author, the structured way of entering it in tables becomes a chore. This is the main problem with creating good recipes. So we try to hit a sweet spot, and bring up a bit of that desired structure the way we parse the ingredients.

The writer is learning continuously with more people using it, and we correcting the imperfections as we spot them. There is no end to the ways in which people may enter ingredients. Our bet is, once the user get to see how it is presented on the final output, the second time they will start visualising the way it needs to be entered. A bit of mutual learning. Meanwhile, we keep looking for patterns and keep correcting these rough edges.

Also there are tons of use cases that we try to solve here. For instance, people who have recipes stored on their personal Onenote/Evernotes accounts or blogs can simply copy/paste the ingredients and steps to the free form editor.This would not have been possible in a structured form.

http://raymondsfood.cucumbertown.com/ recreated around 100 recipes from his blog over a weekend using the editor! Sure, it could still render buggy, but it is possible to iron out the bugs with more data coming in and patterns detected.

[bazzargh]

No need to apologise! I agree that trying to edit in tabular form would be worse than you have now; I was thinking of nudging the users towards the correct mental model purely by styling the divs that don't have the 'current' class.

[anandgrafiti]

I get what you are saying. This is something we are yet to explore. The freeform content editable input mechanism that we use currently is far from perfect with several browser quirks. Added to the common use cases of selection, moving the caret with keyboard etc, it becomes tad more tedius. But it is something we are planning to invest more time on. Thanks a ton for the feedback.