Talk:Computable Document Format

Open format
"CDF is a published public format[3] created by Wolfram Research."

This is misleading. While Wolfram Research implies CDF is an open format in the answer to their FAQ: "Is CDF an open file format?", in fact CDF does not meet the definition of Open format. A publicly available specification for the binary format of the CDF file is not available, preventing third parties from creating or reading these files without reverse engineering.

Unless I've missed a link to the binary format specification, CDF is a proprietary format pretending to be open.

Ipsuid (talk) 14:48, 15 July 2015 (UTC)


 * The binary format of the document is specified in the documentation at for example the key structural elements are listed at . One thing to realize is that the document is specified with an ASCII representation of the language description, so for example Notebook[{Cell["Hello world"]}] is both the language code for generating a document and is the contents of the file that is generated. JonMcLoone (talk) 09:14, 16 July 2015 (UTC)

Impact
Seems that after five years in the wild, the CDF remains almost unknown. The article could do with a section describing what impact it has had, if any, in its various target markets. If it's effectively been a non-event - despite Wolfram's efforts - the question of notability needs to be addressed: Is the format worth following up in future, or will history relegate it to "footnote" status? Whatever the consensus, I see no point in deleting the article, if only to mark this attempt to create a new interactive document standard, perhaps before its time – although many a naysayer forecast an early death for Adobe's PDF format! yoyo (talk) 15:20, 10 September 2016 (UTC)

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