Wolfram Launches Computational Document Format 167
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.'"
What's new here? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.