

Wolfram Launches a New Computable Document Format - coderdude
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wolfram_launches_a_new_computable_document_format.php

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eric-hu
My first reaction is that you'd basically be able to do what a webpage with
javascript could do.

On further thought, I realize that having tools like this lowers the learning
curve for publishing interactive or formula-based documents. Hopefully this
should lead to people producing documents that convey knowledge better.

The main roadblock I see to this becoming more popular is how aggressive they
are about keeping the format and viewer(s) proprietary.

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icebraining
They say the format is open, but the spec is nowhere to be seen. And they
could have wrote an HTML+JS exporter for Mathematica instead of creating yet
another format that requires yet another viewer.

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peterbraden
html + js is already a computable document format, and it runs everywhere, not
in a proprietary viewer.

Pretty sure this won't catch on.

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mey
html + js doesn't have a standard way to be shared outside a website.
Additionally, the skills to produce an interactive cross system compatible
diagram in html/js is outside most people's abilities. Additionally have you
seen the horrible code that most wysiwyg editors produce? I think this will
have a niche purpose, but I doubt it will succeed without some big player
picking it up and running with it. (MS Office, Apple?)

An additional thought, could probably take these documents (haven't looked at
the spec) and generate an html/js representation easily enough.

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mvanveen
Well, yes. You bring up good points. However, engineers like ourselves caught
up in the goal of creating a One True System often run into the dilemma of
pursuing the "MIT way" of doing things.

I remember hearing that there was an MIT project that had many common goals
with Tim Berner Lee's implementation of the World Wide Web. It never saw the
light of day because the engineers were worried to death about how documents
would appear if there was a connectivity problem. Lee sidestepped that whole
mess by showing the good old 404 page. Premature optimization is the devil.

The prevalence of html + js today is a testament to the fact that the ["worse
is better"](<http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html>) design philosophy
has its merits. I don't think this common document format will take off b/c of
the same reasons that every other document format that isn't html + json has
failed. I believe that if the browser wars have taught us anything, it's that
iterative approach is the only thing which will move us closer to realizing
some of your goals.

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cmelbye
Interesting, but requires a browser plug-in? No thanks.

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onedognight
It requires flash.

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nickmain
It requires a proprietary plugin that is 166MB (Mac).

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josscrowcroft
And takes 550MB of hard drive space, unpacked.

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jjm
See: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2789062>

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zirpu
what about sagemath.org ? it uses python on the backend, and rst for the
document format. and it's opensource.

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jsavimbi
Very interesting concept right there.

