Interesting approach! How practical is it though? I can export a tbwx or whatever the extension is, so that those who need the dashboards can use Tableau Reader. I'm however wondering if such model would work for us.
The one thing that I like about Tableau is that its documents are XML, which plays nice with git.
It seemed to work reasonably well since the typical user was only needing it an hour or two each week. All of those users needed some authoring ability so Reader wasn't a solution in this case.
Extracts are binary yes. If you're using a workbook without extracts embedded, you're working with an XML file. We do that most of the time. We only embed extracts when someone with a Tableau Reader license needs to use a dashboard. We normally keep those out of source control.
The one thing that I like about Tableau is that its documents are XML, which plays nice with git.