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Wolfram Launches Computational Document Format
Barence writes "Wolfram Research has launched its own document format, which it claims is 'as everyday as a document, but as interactive as an app.' The Computational Document Format (CDF) allows authors to embed interactive charts, diagrams and graphics into their documents, allowing readers to adjust variables to see how increasing a price affects profits, for example, or display different segments of a brain scan. Wolfram aims to make the format easy enough for non-programmers to use, based on the linguistic commands used in its search engine. '[Currently] anyone who can make an Excel macro should easily be able to make interactivity for CDF,' said Conrad Wolfram. 'Where I'd like to get is that anyone who can make an Excel chart can make interactivity in CDFs.'"
but... does it have a blink tag?
please excuse my apathy
or something like ActiveX control hell? All that interactivity has to come from embedding something.
From the website: Wolfram currently provides the CDF specification as a public format, meaning it is publicly available, openly documented, and natively unencrypted.
Let's hope it stays open.
-- Cheers!
I think he greatly overestimates them.
But I've also made some pretty cool Excel charts, so this will probably be a neat tool for people who can actually use it to its full potential.
http://xkcd.com/927/
Nth post!
(Please compute correct ordinal here.)
Was there any thought whatsoever in terms of security when they developed this format? A document that can embed other objects sounds like an excellent method for distributing malware, etc.
My God, there's a brother? Can you imagine Xmas in that family?
For the same Reason Excel and Powerpoint aren't real analysis tools I expect many people to abuse this tool to prove the wrong things.
Or like the Powerpoint Space Shuttle Foam issue, inadvertantly give the wrong message because they don't know how to convey what they mean to get across.
Most people have no clue how to create a chart that accurately and cleanly shows what they want it to show (Edward Tufte excepted, of course). Frankly, Excel misleads people and directs them into terrible designs or, even worse, into false designs (think of using a "line chart" when what's needed is lines in a "scatterplot."
I sure hope Wolfram can come up with a much *better* way to generate proper charts than Microsoft ever has.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Which leaves out, by my estimate, 99.99% of all the users I have ever supported.
So they're releasing the document format without having a specific application for it such as
Adobe Acrobat : PDF
Corel Draw : CDR
MS Word : DOC
etc...
It's like they're putting the onus on developers and reap the profits of licensing the format out.
-Mætrix-
Dum spiro, spero --While I Breathe, I hope.
From TFA:
My initial thought was 'but what would CDF provide that a spreadsheet can't?"
As it turns out the Wolfram website has some interesting examples. For example the user can drag a slider to change an input value and see the result in graphs, or use the same method to change a photo (using filters).
I see some potential applications in my field (user manuals for complex machines).
the embedded language is relatively simple and based on Mathematica 8. It doesn't appear to provided system functionality like ActiveX.
It seems obvious that this "free" CDF thing is used to drive sales of Mathematica, because the only way to compose these documents is to run their rather expensive software ($2500 for a single user commercial license). The player is free though, but honestly I don't see why there needs to be a player at all. Why can't it just export as Flash and HTML5?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
or something like ActiveX control hell? All that interactivity has to come from embedding something.
They could sandbox it so that no item embedded within a document can modify anything outside the document.
They have to take the same acronym as a 20+ year old file format for storing numbers?
It's almost like they didn't bother putting the term 'CDF file' into a search engine to see if anyone else was using that acronym already for a file extension. (of course, w3 even used it twice)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Sounds a lot like MathCAD. You embed "live" equations in Word documents. Only problem is that you need MathCAD to edit the equations or update the plots. If OpenOffice implemented something like this (like I read TFA... pfff) I would drop Word so fast.
Isn't this pretty much what Adobe did with PDFs.... the reader was free but you had to pay for the writer. Then they enhanced it by adding scripting for interactivity.... and we all know how secure PDFs are.
It sounds good but look at all the problems adobe has with PDF. People embedding viruses and trojans. If this format were to be used, would it really be all that different?
Mean what you say...say what you mean.
As far as I know, MathCAD can do all this already. It's not an open source format, I guess, but the trick is not as much in encoding the formulas but in solving them in real time.
And we all know that there's never been a fault with anyone's sandbox implementation before ;)
just wait for the new malware.
At 221MBs, the "player" is more like an OS.
The player is already almost 500Mb when installed for the first version... If it follows Adobe Acrobat steps, it's not going to get any better... Call me uninterrested.
It sounds like something between Excel and OpenDoc (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc, http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?OpenDoc).
I see that Mathematica will be required to create documents, but the target audience for this document format (repeatedly described by Wolfram and simple and easy) seem that they would have little use for a powerful and quite expensive piece of technical software. The format looks convenient if you already happen to be a Mathematica user, but it's a little strange to aim at a wider audience who are unlikely to have use for most of Mathematica's functionality.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
At this stage pretty much any TLA is being used by someone as a file format name.
I am trolling
And virus, bot, and trojan makers the world over rejoice at the new opportunities for exploits! This looks like it will be a bitch to make secure. On the other hand, it also does look like it could be pretty cool.
Also, oblig xkcd .
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Everyone is moving to cloud services so having an interactive document is equivalent to browsing the web. I think the Apple and Android app stores proves that developing software is no longer complicated and all kinds of interactivity can be developed rather easily, so why bother with an interactive document format that offers less features. I think this concept has missed its mark by about 20 years and there are more then enough exceptional technologies one can employ to offer a much better interactive experience.
Not sure how many Mathematica cluster exist, but Sage has started eating their server side market. Sage's various backends are just way better designed for really intensive computational work, while Sage & Cython reduce the learning curve for each.
I hear that Wolfram's salaries kinda suck too, btw.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I don't like how Wolfram use existing formats. How hyperlinking graphics from Wolfram break, and so on. Don't seems fair players on the internet.
Creating a new file format? cool. Where is the extensive documentation site online? ... what is this, a formulary to enter my data? WTF?, This smell like a propietery format to solve his problem: Wolfram don't want to play by the internet rules, don't want people from hotlinking his graphics, and stuff, so don't want to use GIF and PNG. Want internet to change to adapt to thenselves.
I think I say here DO NOT WANT.
-Woof woof woof!
Sage goes in every field.
If the scripting language doesn't have any access to external data, what sort of attack vector could there be?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Have you considered that pretty much every basic three letter file extension that makes any sense has already been used at some point in time somewhere? There is no real authority as to who "owns" an extension, only a general consensus.
Exploit a bug in the viewer app to give full access to the user account?
I read the internet for the articles.
Not when they cannot perform simple geometrical calculations.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=triangle+with+sides+0.4592+meters%2C+0.6+meters%2C+0.6+meters
180 degrees, not 181, should be the sum of all internal angles.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
If fail to see how this could be useful?
Most PDF's I receive are printable versions of info which is also available online.
If they want to make use of interactive content, they usually include a URL, which makes pretty much sense to me.
Also, didn't Adobe include similar features in its Acrobat reader, which were later exploited by maleware-writers?
You're assuming malice. But the most likely thing is that they used Wolfram Alpha to search for "CDF" instead of using Google or Ixquick. ;)
Similar cluelessness abounds in their comparison chart which claims e.g. that HTML5 is incapable of a "dynamic document hierarchy" while "Readers can dynamically open and close chapters and sections in CDF documents. CDF also supports hierarchical, tab, slide, flip, opener, and other document organizations."
All of Matematica, Maple, and MathCAD have had their own worksheet/document formats since the mid-90s at least. They have gone through many incarnations but I believe all of them now support embedding code, graphics, marked-up text, etc. Maple's Document format certainly does.
Exactly what is new about this, other than a new name and, well, further grist for Stephen Wolfram's publicity mill?
Is the idea simply to have a thin-client reader and offload most of the computation to remote servers? Because if so then that is the innovation, not some new document format.
I can't stand the monstrosities they try to create using Word and Excel today... don't give them even more power... please
All we need is another file format that executes logic and sends information to entities outside of your computer by default.
Dynamic charting objects in virtually every web based language can handle this already. Other than fattening up their coffers a bit more, locking users into their own "proprietary" format, and gaining more marketshare... what exactly is the benefit of this? Other than for Wolfram that is, heh.
now what ?
Nullius in verba
HTML+JS, XAML+VB.NET, and (obviously) Excel+VBA already meet this standard. And are widely deployed. Why do we need CDF as currently implemented?
And I'd like a pet unicorn. The hardest part of the task "make interactivity" (at least, interactivity that works correctly, without which interactivity is useless) in modern high-level environments isn't syntax, its developing the analytical skills necessary to clearly define what you want out of the interactivity. Non-interactive charts are conceptually simpler than any interactive behavior and will always be easier to specify a simple non-interactive like than to define useful interaction.
Can I remove the welcome screen, toolbar, or watermark logo I see when opening CDFs in CDF Player or viewing CDFs online with the web browser plugin?
The presence of Wolfram branding is part of the FreeCDF licensing terms...
They've got to be kidding if they expect anyone to make serious use of an 'open' format that requires a proprietary player with advertising all over it. Compare with PDF, which is not 'free' but at least seamlessly operates with, say LaTeX.
i tried to find mathreader today, but i endend up on a broken page. I downloaded the CDF viewer and it did not work (ubuntu 11.04)
If this format were to be used, would it really be all that different?
No.
It requires Mathematica 8 (very expensive for non-students) to create such a document. So I doubt it is going to be real popular.
A chart is not a macro. Well, it sorta is, but to equate "making a chart" to "making a macro" is like equating "heating a ready meal" to "cooking".
I was thinking, the number of people who can make Excel macros is actually probably quite small. Now I'm wondering, how many people even know what an Excel macro is?
considering they are in the business of writing high end mathematics software, and CDF files are primarily used to store data for high end mathematics programs,
yes, I would say it is a bad idea
The filetype is Computable Document Format, per the Wolfram website, not Computational.
Wolfram and Heart... providing all of your demonic document format needs.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Seems the Legal Eagles at Wolfram forgot to check about ... there is already CDF and netCDF format that is
copyrighted and patented NOT by Wolfram.
A few Foots will be lost in the Vietnam Style carnage to come.
How are they going to reach an install penetration ratio that justifies this new format?
Each and every CDF example they give could have been done in HTML5 or Flash
I don't think we will hear much from this new format.
Of course not, they entered it into Wolfram Alpha which turned up that it had previously been used for The Odessa File by Frederick Forsyth...
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Strikes me as akin to Knuth's Literate Programming (and many later implementations of it). Although with the usual LP methods, you have to extract the software from the document before you can run it. An interesting idea, to run it directly in the document... Not very archivable, though, since the chances of this document format being interpretable in 50 years is, IMO, slim.