I was reading Wolfram's explanation at this page of what CDF is, i.e.
Today's online documents are like yesterday's paper—flat, lifeless, inactive. Instead, CDF puts easy-to-author interactivity at its core, empowering readers to drive content and generate results live.
Launched by Wolfram, the CDF standard is a computation-powered knowledge container—as everyday as a document, but as interactive as an app.
So, it seems this is a standard. But I failed to find any documentation on the format itself. Is it an open format? Can I make my own independent software which would create CDF files which CDFPlayer can play? Or am I supposed to always need Mathematica to create CDF files?
.cdf
and opened and manipulated). But if you change the code and don't updateNotebookSignature
line accordingly, it will be useless with Free Player, since dynamic content will be disabled there. $\endgroup$NotebookSignature
does answer the question, doesn't it? As a CDF file is only valid with that signature and these signatures exist so that only WRI software can generate valid CDF files the format is proprietary by design. Even without the signature, as there is no official documentation of the file content I would think that excludes it from being an open format... $\endgroup$