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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.'"
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.
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.
Don't touch it without an assignment of copyright to a community body and a patent indemnification.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
It gets worse. From the EULA:
Certain functionality in the Product may require the Software to access collections of data available through external servers. WRI makes no warranty that access to such data will be uninterrupted or that the data itself will be error free. WRI reserves the right to restrict access to, add, update, modify, or remove collections of data based on availability, Your service subscription, or otherwise at WRI's discretion.
So once they get enough suckers signed up, they can make it a pay service.
Yeah, they seem to be abusing the term "free" and "public" in a manner that I don't think most people would expect. From the licensing page:
And that asterisk?
Which looks suspiciously like their "free public format" is, in fact, closed and proprietary.
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!
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.