4 ms·

I'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 o

by jjm 15y ago

I'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 ago
I 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 ago
  I 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.
  - arjunnarayan 15y ago
    What we really need is a latex compiling tool like pdflatex except the output is a series of HTML files. And while I know that there exists some versions out there, we really need one that doesn't suck, along with internet appropriate style files, that just spits out html+javascript+css.
    - anigbrowl 15y ago
      But as an end-user, I don't want a series of files. Source code is a major pain in the ass if you're not actively working on it. the whole win of PDF for most people, including me most of the time, is that I don't want to edit the document, but everything is neatly contained within a single file that is ready for printing or viewing with no additional libraries, dependencies, or anything else but a PDF viewer. I have a few thousand pdf files on my hard disk and already find it hard to manage the collection. If every single on of them had a source tree it would make me cry.
      - majmun 15y ago
        i think .mht file format does that for HTML/JS/* minus all the graphs
        anigbrowl 15y ago
        I know. I rather miss the option to just save a web page as a self-contained file in Chrome, because I used to use that all the time. It's not that you can't do the same things with web technologies, but that it's so much less convenient to do so. I think this is why Instapaper and Readability have become such big hits, because they offer simplicity and one-step document management. PDF does the same thing for more complex documents that need to be presented in a consistent fashion. This CDF format looks like it could be ideal for textbooks, instruction manuals and the like. There's another comment downthread where I talk about why I don't actually want all the possible editing capabilities to be available most of the time. Sometimes you want to maximize convenience rather than control.
      - 15y ago
- taliesinb 15y ago
  That's exactly right. If I could elaborate a bit: For sure, web developers and programmers can do most of what CDF can do, on their own, in HTML5. It might take them a lot longer, but they could certainly end up with a nice finished product. This doesn't solve the problem. The problem is neatly illustrated by the fact that news organizations, which have a huge incentive to make compelling, sticky interactivity that wraps their news properties, haven't gone for it. I've only seen two non-trivial uses, the NYT and BBC News, and its clear these were bespoke jobs that cost them a lot of money. The same goes for textbook publishers, scientists, NGOs, etc, anywhere were technical communication could be significantly improved with interactive documents. This problem remains unsolved. CDF aims to make it possible for someone to crank out an interactive figure or document in a matter of hours, not weeks, with very little code. A side comment: I say this without any real proof, but WRI specializes in doing interesting things that are economically self-sustaining, rather than things that make a lot of money. Mathematica is far from a cash cow, and WRI is a small company (~500 people), but it has lasted 25 years, and it regularly adds cutting edge technology to its portfolio. Obviously, it gets to balance profit with "interestingness" mainly because it is privately owned, and Stephen likes collecting interesting people and interesting projects for them to do.
  - msollami 15y ago
    Wow, taliesinb is making a lot more sense than you guys.
- jjm 15y ago
  I appreciate your thoughtful reply! One (of the many i'm sure) problems here you defined are: "...who would love to have a way to embed interactive graphs and tables into your papers to make them more understandable for the reader..." The solution however may not necessarily be a private 'reader', 'player', or 'binary'. Though the 'format' may be 'open' this single implementation isn't. You bring up Adobe which isn't a very good business case to follow as the very reasons I brought up are pressing the industry to move toward open implementations[1][2], away from 'free' binary distributions and plugins (for a various list of reasons from security[2], to access on other systems/apps). This really isn't 1999, and CDF isn't yet a popular nor a de-facto standard[1] much like PDF was. Besides you and I are much more capable these days with newer and _open_ technologies are we not (browser, linux, open documents, etc...)? Speaking of documents, other examples of 'perceived' open standard files are Microsoft's ill faded OSP[3] promise which spawned traction for OD/F[4] and other. These reasons are why HTML5/CSS3/JS as a basis to create an open two way street for 'documents' and/or formats are so powerful. It is not enough to only provide an 'open' format, but also an open implementation. This way both use of and implementation of such product be beneficial toward academic progress. Why wouldn't that alone be worth it? Thus a likely more popular solution I am proposing to your problem could be a service that uses HTML5/CSS3/JS in the delivery which solves your problem in a WYSIWG general user manner. Especially so as the very tools (your browser, and a million libraries must I really list them all?), UIX experience, and entrepreneurs (HN! Y-comb!) already exist! To your quote "Some problems are best solved by large corporations trying to make money" I would say the same to "Some problems are best solved by small groups of entrepreneurs or open source developers trying to make money and/or looking for peer fame." I would go further in saying that for 'open' standards and implementations, that small group of entrepreneurs or open source developers are the ones carrying the torch of open-ness [5][6][7][8][and on and on...] and innovation. [1] "was originally a proprietary format controlled by Adobe", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format [2] http://andreasgal.com/2011/06/15/pdf-js/ http://andreasgal.com/2011/06/15/pdf-js/ [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Open_Specification_Promise http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Open_Specification_Pr... [5] http://blog.documentfoundation.org/2011/06/01/statement-about-oracles-move-to-donate-openoffice-org-assets-to-the-apache-foundation/ http://blog.documentfoundation.org/2011/06/01/statement-abou... [6] http://www.infoworld.com/d/application-development/oracle-hands-hudson-eclipse-jenkins-fork-seems-permanent-021 http://www.infoworld.com/d/application-development/oracle-ha... [8] http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Jul-18.html http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Jul-18.html
jjm 15y ago
RWW wrote: "...I doubt other companies will want to or be able to catch up to Wolfram in the sophistication of the tools they offer..." If anyone would like to join up and create an alternative I'm game. Lets do this. My full info is in my profile.
raphman 15y ago
Additionally, the CDF player desktop app for Linux is a 200 MB behemoth. When I saw this, I immediately canceled the download. (For comparison: Adobe Reader is about 70 MB.)

by jjm 15y ago

john_b 15y ago

I 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 ago
I 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.
- arjunnarayan 15y ago
  What we really need is a latex compiling tool like pdflatex except the output is a series of HTML files. And while I know that there exists some versions out there, we really need one that doesn't suck, along with internet appropriate style files, that just spits out html+javascript+css.
  - anigbrowl 15y ago
    But as an end-user, I don't want a series of files. Source code is a major pain in the ass if you're not actively working on it. the whole win of PDF for most people, including me most of the time, is that I don't want to edit the document, but everything is neatly contained within a single file that is ready for printing or viewing with no additional libraries, dependencies, or anything else but a PDF viewer. I have a few thousand pdf files on my hard disk and already find it hard to manage the collection. If every single on of them had a source tree it would make me cry.
    - majmun 15y ago
      i think .mht file format does that for HTML/JS/* minus all the graphs
      - anigbrowl 15y ago
        I know. I rather miss the option to just save a web page as a self-contained file in Chrome, because I used to use that all the time. It's not that you can't do the same things with web technologies, but that it's so much less convenient to do so. I think this is why Instapaper and Readability have become such big hits, because they offer simplicity and one-step document management. PDF does the same thing for more complex documents that need to be presented in a consistent fashion. This CDF format looks like it could be ideal for textbooks, instruction manuals and the like. There's another comment downthread where I talk about why I don't actually want all the possible editing capabilities to be available most of the time. Sometimes you want to maximize convenience rather than control.
    - 15y ago
taliesinb 15y ago
That's exactly right. If I could elaborate a bit: For sure, web developers and programmers can do most of what CDF can do, on their own, in HTML5. It might take them a lot longer, but they could certainly end up with a nice finished product. This doesn't solve the problem. The problem is neatly illustrated by the fact that news organizations, which have a huge incentive to make compelling, sticky interactivity that wraps their news properties, haven't gone for it. I've only seen two non-trivial uses, the NYT and BBC News, and its clear these were bespoke jobs that cost them a lot of money. The same goes for textbook publishers, scientists, NGOs, etc, anywhere were technical communication could be significantly improved with interactive documents. This problem remains unsolved. CDF aims to make it possible for someone to crank out an interactive figure or document in a matter of hours, not weeks, with very little code. A side comment: I say this without any real proof, but WRI specializes in doing interesting things that are economically self-sustaining, rather than things that make a lot of money. Mathematica is far from a cash cow, and WRI is a small company (~500 people), but it has lasted 25 years, and it regularly adds cutting edge technology to its portfolio. Obviously, it gets to balance profit with "interestingness" mainly because it is privately owned, and Stephen likes collecting interesting people and interesting projects for them to do.
- msollami 15y ago
  Wow, taliesinb is making a lot more sense than you guys.
jjm 15y ago
I appreciate your thoughtful reply! One (of the many i'm sure) problems here you defined are: "...who would love to have a way to embed interactive graphs and tables into your papers to make them more understandable for the reader..." The solution however may not necessarily be a private 'reader', 'player', or 'binary'. Though the 'format' may be 'open' this single implementation isn't. You bring up Adobe which isn't a very good business case to follow as the very reasons I brought up are pressing the industry to move toward open implementations[1][2], away from 'free' binary distributions and plugins (for a various list of reasons from security[2], to access on other systems/apps). This really isn't 1999, and CDF isn't yet a popular nor a de-facto standard[1] much like PDF was. Besides you and I are much more capable these days with newer and _open_ technologies are we not (browser, linux, open documents, etc...)? Speaking of documents, other examples of 'perceived' open standard files are Microsoft's ill faded OSP[3] promise which spawned traction for OD/F[4] and other. These reasons are why HTML5/CSS3/JS as a basis to create an open two way street for 'documents' and/or formats are so powerful. It is not enough to only provide an 'open' format, but also an open implementation. This way both use of and implementation of such product be beneficial toward academic progress. Why wouldn't that alone be worth it? Thus a likely more popular solution I am proposing to your problem could be a service that uses HTML5/CSS3/JS in the delivery which solves your problem in a WYSIWG general user manner. Especially so as the very tools (your browser, and a million libraries must I really list them all?), UIX experience, and entrepreneurs (HN! Y-comb!) already exist! To your quote "Some problems are best solved by large corporations trying to make money" I would say the same to "Some problems are best solved by small groups of entrepreneurs or open source developers trying to make money and/or looking for peer fame." I would go further in saying that for 'open' standards and implementations, that small group of entrepreneurs or open source developers are the ones carrying the torch of open-ness [5][6][7][8][and on and on...] and innovation. [1] "was originally a proprietary format controlled by Adobe", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format [2] http://andreasgal.com/2011/06/15/pdf-js/ http://andreasgal.com/2011/06/15/pdf-js/ [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Open_Specification_Promise http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Open_Specification_Pr... [5] http://blog.documentfoundation.org/2011/06/01/statement-about-oracles-move-to-donate-openoffice-org-assets-to-the-apache-foundation/ http://blog.documentfoundation.org/2011/06/01/statement-abou... [6] http://www.infoworld.com/d/application-development/oracle-hands-hudson-eclipse-jenkins-fork-seems-permanent-021 http://www.infoworld.com/d/application-development/oracle-ha... [8] http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Jul-18.html http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Jul-18.html

jjm 15y ago

RWW wrote: "...I doubt other companies will want to or be able to catch up to Wolfram in the sophistication of the tools they offer..." If anyone would like to join up and create an alternative I'm game. Lets do this. My full info is in my profile.

raphman 15y ago

Additionally, the CDF player desktop app for Linux is a 200 MB behemoth. When I saw this, I immediately canceled the download. (For comparison: Adobe Reader is about 70 MB.)