Computable Document Format

http://www.wolfram.com/cdf/

by franze • 15 years ago

129 79 15 years ago

exit• 15 years ago

what does this do that couldn't be done with html5?

Joakal2• 15 years ago

From 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• 15 years ago

You need a CDF player, which is essentially a browser for CDF documents.

romanows• 15 years ago

Sell 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

derleth4• 15 years 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• 15 years ago

HTML5 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• 15 years ago

My 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.

taliesinb9• 15 years ago

Well, 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.

anigbrowl5• 15 years ago

HTML is the document format of the future.

Yes, I've been saying that since about 1992. I'm not disagreeing with you, mind; I really like the idea of a lightweight WYSIWYG tool that lets me create complex documents without having to fiddle about with code.

extension2• 15 years ago

Be 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• 15 years ago

This 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.

Joakal2• 15 years ago

It's not quite free: 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

thristian2• 15 years ago

Sure, 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• 15 years ago

And they don't state if they hold any patents that covers CDF.

extension2• 15 years ago

I would imagine any company with a decent size patent portfolio has one that covers this.

gulbrandr• 15 years ago

>> Wolfram currently provides the CDF specification as a public format, meaning it is publicly available, openly documented, and natively unencrypted.

Sure, but where is it?!

Good luck finding it: http://www.google.com/search?q=Computable+Document+Format+sp...

lnp• 15 years ago

Example CDF files can be opened in any text editor.

macmac2• 15 years ago

Interesting notion that you have to pay a license fee if you want to charge for the document. This means that if you want to do a consultancy report using CDF you have to pay a separate fee even if you already paid for the authoring environment (Mathematica). Maybe Microsoft should pursue this licensing model?

tommi• 15 years ago

Reminds me of PDF.

techas• 15 years ago

I guess they are trying to go on this direction: http://www.executablepapers.com/

jjm3• 15 years 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• 15 years 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_s2• 15 years 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.

taliesinb9• 15 years 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.

jjm3• 15 years 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

[2] http://andreasgal.com/2011/06/15/pdf-js/

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Open_Specification_Pr...

[5] http://blog.documentfoundation.org/2011/06/01/statement-abou...

[6] http://www.infoworld.com/d/application-development/oracle-ha...

[8] http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Jul-18.html

jjm3• 15 years 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• 15 years 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.)

josephkern• 15 years ago

This is very similar to org-mode with babel and latex output. http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/intro.html

codeup• 15 years ago

That was my first thought, too.

WWWWH• 15 years ago

Absolutely, 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/) as suggested elsewhere on this page.

karol• 15 years ago

There is something like this for HTML + CSS. It's called tangle.js and was created by Bret Victor: http://worrydream.com/Tangle/

leftnode• 15 years ago

Totally off topic, but that is an amazing Javascript library. Thank you.

king_magic• 15 years ago

That is absolutely incredible. Thank you!

romaniv• 15 years ago

Very 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• 15 years ago

That's very nice. Worth a separate HN post, I think.

macmac2• 15 years ago

This is a fantastic project. Why has it been kept secret? :-)

vannevar6• 15 years ago

This 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• 15 years 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• 15 years ago

Not 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_...

taliesinb9• 15 years ago

This 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.

taliesinb9• 15 years ago

Let me disabuse you of that notion: Stephen is more aware of what is going on the wider world than anyone else I know or have ever met. Like him or hate him, he's a true polymath. Our meetings will often wander off to the topic of famous Silicon Valley implosions, or Feynman stories, or the tales from the Institute of Advanced Studies, or the future of augmented reality.

So, with some knowledge of the man, I can say honestly that the charge that he's oblivious of the evolution of HTML is completely laughable. A random illustration: Wolfram Research was one of the first companies to go online in the early 90s (as it happens, Tim Berners-Lee is a long-time Mathematica user). An amusing story: it was also one of the only companies to survive the original Morris worm unscathed, owing to deliberate use of obscure Japanese computers for WRI's gateway.

While I can't talk about unannounced technologies, I can say that HTML5 plays a pretty crucial role in our future technologies. In fact, CDF will eventually have a server-side incarnation that relies on HTML5 for client-side interactivity.

vannevar6• 15 years ago

Wolfram seems like brilliant guy, and Mathematica is certainly a brilliant achievement. But it nonetheless seems backward-looking to introduce a dynamic document format that requires a proprietary authoring system and a proprietary player at this point in history.

sbierwagen• 15 years ago

Taliesinb, you really should be disclosing the fact that you work for Wolfram Alpha, in this comment thread. It is not at all obvious from glancing at your profile.

anigbrowl5• 15 years ago

ongoing evolution of HTML5 and Javascript

I don't think so. I think it's more likely that he's fully aware of said evolution but appreciates that most people are not developers and want a nice self-contained live document format that they can email as a single-file attachment if need be.

vannevar6• 15 years ago

most people are not developers

Most people don't have a copy of Mathematica lying around either, and it appears to be a requirement for authoring CDFs: http://www.wolfram.com/cdf/faq/ .

tzs• 15 years ago

> 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

I don't think you looked very closely at CDF. It looks like it has a very large fraction of Mathematica in the player. You aren't going to get anywhere close to what you can do in CDF via HTML5 and JavaScript without a truly ungodly amount of work, and it would still be unusable for many things due to performance issues.

vannevar6• 15 years ago

You aren't going to get anywhere close to what you can do in CDF via HTML5 and JavaScript without a truly ungodly amount of work...

The same argument was being made in favor of Flash a few years ago. Eventually it turns out that someone does that 'ungodly amount of work.' Why shouldn't it be Wolfram? He would have a leg up on everyone if he embraced the new standards and opened up the Mathematica walled garden a little.

tybris2• 15 years ago

This is not an HTML replacement, but a PDF replacement. HTML has never been, and probably never will be, a popular format for static documents.

vannevar6• 15 years ago

I wouldn't be so sure that HTML isn't becoming a PDF replacement. And it seems odd to pitch a dynamic document format as a better type of static document. The whole point of CDF is that it isn't static.

onedognight• 15 years ago

One things that is missing from html is a "jar" like format so that an entire document can be contained in a single file (without data: hacks).

It seems that all we need is an extension, I propose ".htz" and a mime type, say "application/x-html-bundle". Browser's would just download it and open the containing "index.html" (at the top level or inside a unique top level directory) and open other assets relative to that.

javanix• 15 years ago

I'm not sure I'm entirely thrilled about a new document format that requires a 106mb download to view.

antimora2• 15 years ago

231MB for Linux. This is 7 times larger than my browser.

josscrowcroft• 15 years ago

Fantastic 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!

antimora2• 15 years ago

Here 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

ChuckMcM• 15 years ago

Meta 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.

Computable Document Format

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