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Computable Document Format
- exit 15y agowhat does this do that couldn't be done with html5?
- Joakal 15y agoFrom skimming it, it seems to be a shared file without need of a browser. It's like viewing an interactive PDF/Flash in a [CDF] player.
- jasondavies 15y agoYou need a CDF player, which is essentially a browser for CDF documents.
- romanows 15y agoSell more copies of Mathematica? There is this comparison chart, but it seems to confuse the document itself with the editing framework: http://www.wolfram.com/cdf/compare-cdf/how-cdf-compares.html http://www.wolfram.com/cdf/compare-cdf/how-cdf-compares.html
- derleth 15y ago> it seems to confuse the document itself with the editing framework Is it me, or is this a sign the format isn't going to be open in any meaningful sense?
- antics 15y agoHTML5 needs to be geared towards things that websites can do in general, where CDF appears to be geared towards a very specific set of tasks. In other words, possibly nothing, but your original question may or may not be the right question to ask.
- tomelders 15y agoMy first thought exactly. HTML is the document format of the future. It seems almost everything can read HTML these days. Here we have an excellent, feature packed, well tested, well documented format that appears to offer everything CDF offers and more. All we need now are applications geared towards delivering the right tools to perform the necessary task. One of my side projects is a HTML word processor, and every time I look at a common Word processor feature, HTML offers a ton of free and easy to implement ways to make that feature better.
- taliesinb 15y agoWell, here's something that HTML5 can't do (at least easily). Dynamic @ Graphics @ Point @ ImageKeypoints @ CurrentImage[] What does this do? It takes a video stream from your webcam, extracts SURF keypoints ("salient" parts of the image, like corners), and plots them live. Note that all those functions are online at reference.wolfram.com. THAT'S A CDF! You have access to some heavy duty algorithms covering a vast number of fields. In fact its kind of surprising it fits in a few hundred megs. You're essentially getting the whole of Mathematica, for free.
- iandanforth 15y agoThat's cool, and compared to writing the code to do that manually, it's compact, but I'm having trouble imagining a worse syntax and naming scheme for achieving that task. Give me this: stream = OpenVideoStream(device) render1 = stream.surf() render2 = stream.sift() etc. display(outDevice, stream)
- psykotic 15y agoThe infix @ operator is just right-associative application, so a @ b @ c is synonymous with a[b[c]]. It plays the same syntactic role as $ does in Haskell for writing pipeline-style code.
- derleth 15y agoAnd how many of those CDF files will still be readable in ten years?
- extension 15y agoBe authored by regular non-programming shmoes, if you take Wolfram's word for it. It looks like they've discovered an interactivity model that is unusually simple while still being relatively powerful.
- jerf 15y agoThis isn't a useful question. With Canvas, HTML5 can do "anything". With Turing Equivalence, any programming language can do "anything". The question isn't what the global space of possibilities is, it's what is easier or harder.
- Joakal 15y agoIt's not quite free: http://www.wolfram.com/cdf/adopting-cdf/licensing-options.html http://www.wolfram.com/cdf/adopting-cdf/licensing-options.ht... At least it's an open format apparently: http://www.wolfram.com/cdf/faq/#aboutcdf http://www.wolfram.com/cdf/faq/#aboutcdf
- lnp 15y agoExample CDF files can be opened in any text editor.
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- thristian 15y agoSure, it says "publicly available, openly documented", but I can't actually find a file-format spec anywhere. Given that CDF files seem to be able to do most things Mathematica can do, I'm guessing that might mean "publically available to anyone who pays us for a Mathematica SDK licence".
- perlgeek 15y agoAnd they don't state if they hold any patents that covers CDF.
- tommi 15y agoReminds me of PDF.
- techas 15y agoI guess they are trying to go on this direction: http://www.executablepapers.com/ http://www.executablepapers.com/
- jjm 15y agoI'm really not for anything that can't readily be done in HTML5+CSS3+JS atm. Especially If i need to make people _download_ a 'player'. What is this, 1999 all over again (some might say yes ha). I can see big corp. getting excited over this just like 99% of the crap they buy and don't use. That said, this doesn't exactly move forward with global progress on the problem or solution (as well it shouldn't wolfram is a corp after all... in the business to make money).
- john_b 15y agoI don't think the average person on HN is the target audience for this in the first place. If you know HTML5 and Javascript and work in a web-based environment most of the time, then this probably won't help you much. On the other hand, if you are, like me, one of the many people in academia who would love to have a way to embed interactive graphs and tables into your papers to make them more understandable for the reader, then this is potentially very useful. Especially since very few people in academia (outside CS departments anyway) know or have any interest in learning HTML5, and many already use or have easy access to Mathematica to begin with. Also, Wolfram being a corporation is irrelevant. Some problems are best solved by large corporations trying to make money. That may or may not be the case here, but they definitely have an incentive to keep the format open (in some sense) and promulgate the free CDN reader (much like Adobe has done in the past).
- scott_s 15y agoI think a better solution is to develop a standard HTML5, CSS and JavaScript combo that researchers can use to publish articles online. The requirements are that using it should be no more difficult than writing papers in Latex, and the layout results should be equally as good. I've thought about this for a while now. It seems terribly silly for us to spend so much time formatting our papers as pdfs when people mostly read them on a computer anyway. I've been to conferences that - smartly - don't even print the proceedings. They just hand you a USB key with all of the papers and a table of contents in HTML that has authors and titles that links to the correct file.
- 15y ago
- josephkern 15y agoThis is very similar to org-mode with babel and latex output. http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/intro.html http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/intro.html
- codeup 15y agoThat was my first thought, too.
- WWWWH 15y agoAbsolutely, although I guess that the advantage of this is if you want to play with someone else's analysis you don't have to install the same analysis software. I guess I'll be sticking with org mode though and trying Tangle (http://worrydream.com/Tangle/ http://worrydream.com/Tangle/) as suggested elsewhere on this page.
- karol 15y agoThere is something like this for HTML + CSS. It's called tangle.js and was created by Bret Victor: http://worrydream.com/Tangle/ http://worrydream.com/Tangle/
- leftnode 15y agoTotally off topic, but that is an amazing Javascript library. Thank you.
- king_magic 15y agoThat is absolutely incredible. Thank you!
- romaniv 15y agoVery interesting. I really like the concept of draggable digits. They are more compact than sliders, easier to make changes to and give better feedback. Now I wish this was a standard UI element / HTML input type.
- ggchappell 15y agoThat's very nice. Worth a separate HN post, I think.
- macmac 15y agoThis is a fantastic project. Why has it been kept secret? :-)
- vannevar 15y agoThis is a recurring problem with Wolfram: he honestly doesn't seem to be aware of what is going on in the world at large. When he came out with 'A New Kind of Science', everyone in academia was aghast that he had spent 10 years of his life reproducing research that was readily available in existing academic papers (not that NKOS wasn't a great book, but it was hardly new science). Now he's pushing a technology that indeed looks as if it belongs in 1999, as though he's completely oblivious to the ongoing evolution of HTML5 and Javascript.
- praptak 15y ago"he's completely oblivious to the ongoing evolution of HTML5 and Javascript" I sincerely hope he's also dead wrong on the acceptability of a single company owning your communication in 2011.
- sedachv 15y agoNot only that, the only interesting thing from ANKOS was plagiarized by Wolfram from one of his research assistants: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Cook#Work_with_Stephen_Wolfram http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Cook#Work_with_Stephen_...
- taliesinb 15y agoThis also happens to be untrue, to put it generously. As far as I understand the story, Stephen told Matthew: here, this CA seems rich enough for universality, can you prove this for the book? Matthew duly proved it -- a tour-de-force proof, to be sure. Then Matthew broke his NDA by publishing the result early. Stephen litigated to avoid it becoming public prematurely (it was, as you say, the center-piece of the book). I'm not privy to all the ins and outs and what-have-yous, but that seems fair. If you tried to publish something behind your advisor's back in an academic setting, you'd have a lot to answer for. Matthew eventually did publish the Rule 110 proof under his own name in Wolfram's own journal. I speak for myself, not WRI, here.
- cschmidt 15y ago
- javanix 15y agoI'm not sure I'm entirely thrilled about a new document format that requires a 106mb download to view.
- antimora 15y ago231MB for Linux. This is 7 times larger than my browser.
- josscrowcroft 15y agoFantastic idea, horrendous implementation, unfortunately. It needs over half a gigabyte of drive space to install the reader, which pretty much kills this for widespread adoption. Great tech insights, though!
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- antimora 15y agoHere is the comparison with other formats (PDF, JS, Flash, etc). There are many marketing lies in it! For one, it claims that PDF is not embedded in the browser and CDF is yes? "Full page within a browser" is yes but not for JS? "Dynamically interactive charts and diagrams" is partially supported?? Could anyone please explain to me what I am missing here? http://www.wolfram.com/cdf/compare-cdf/how-cdf-compares.html http://www.wolfram.com/cdf/compare-cdf/how-cdf-compares.html
- ChuckMcM 15y agoMeta comment, when I read it I thought 'you've invented a spreadsheet interchange format?' Having looked at the technology in depth I can appreciate the notion of building into the document the computation that went into it. This could be a killer way to distribute component data sheets where all the graphs were 'live'. That being said, it scares the crap out of me. Why? Because I've got Frame documents which are unusable (there is no available version of Frame which will read them, and no legal way to obtain said version) This is a particularly insidious form of bit rot. I save PDF documents on CD with a self contained C language implementation of a PDF reader that can read them and a set of fonts that work that reader. Without the equivalent for CDF I worry about having critical information (or simply relevant information) that cannot be viewed or used. At least with PDF if you print it out the paper version is still usable. Not so if you don't have an open source version of Mathematica to interpret what you read.