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Re: How to write a "proper" math document

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg120125] Re: How to write a "proper" math document
• From: AES <siegman at stanford.edu>
• Date: Sat, 9 Jul 2011 07:31:21 -0400 (EDT)
• References: <iv6h59$s8u$1@smc.vnet.net>

In article <iv6h59$s8u$1 at smc.vnet.net>, John Fultz <jfultz at wolfram.com> 
wrote:

> That you may not be aware of this isn't your fault.  Wolfram hasn't said much 
> about it yet because we've been in the process of making sure that we can 
> launch 
> the right message about CDF in a strong way.  There will be a lot more to be 
> said about CDF soon...I expect that before long plenty will be said on the 
> Wolfram website and elsewhere describing it in much more detail.  But the 
> functionality is already there, in version 8, and I encourage you to play 
> with 
> it.

Thank you for this detailed post.

But, will CDF become a genuinely open, published, internationally 
standardized, and long-term time-stable format, in the general fashion 
of JPEG, TIFF, PDF, EPS, ASCII, RTF, TeX syntax, and so on?

Mathematica has alway been fairly helpful in both generating and dealing 
with (exporting and importing) a wide variety of formats.  But will it 
be possible for a "thousand flowers to bloom" in the form of non-Wolfram 
software tools to also read, write, create, edit, and display CDF files?

If not, we'll still be in the same trap of proprietary formats that 
Microsoft used to confine so many people for so long -- and that Apple 
is now obviously moving toward in its iOS ecosystem.