The format was designed to "offer frequently updated collections of information, or channels, from any web server for automatic delivery to compatible receiver programs.
Smart Offline Favorites, like channels, enabled users to view webpages from the cache.
Submitted to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in March 1997 for consideration as a web standard,[2] CDF marked Microsoft's attempt to capitalize on the push technology trend led by PointCast.
[3] The most notable implementation of CDF was Microsoft's Active Desktop, an optional feature introduced with the Internet Explorer 4.0 browser in September 1997.
CDF prefigured aspects of the RSS file format introduced by Netscape in March 1999,[6] and of web syndication at large.