OOXML? For Pete's Sake, No

Peter Murray-Rust is one of the key figures in the world of open data and open science, and deserves a lot of the credit for making these issues more visible. Here's an interesting post in which he points out that PDF files are not ideal from an archiving viewpoint:

I should make it clear that I am not religiously opposed to PDF, just to the present incarnation of PDF and the mindset that it engenders in publishers, repositarians, and readers. (Authors generally do not use PDF).

He then discusses in detail what the problems are and what solutions might be. Then he drops this clanger:

I’m not asking for XML. I’m asking for either XHTML or Word (or OOXML)

Word? OOXML??? Come on, Peter, you want open formats and you're willing to accept one of the most botched "standards" around, knocked up for purely political reasons, that includes gobs of proprietary elements and is probably impossible for anyone other than Microsoft to implement? *That's* open? I don't think so....

XHTML by all means, and if you want a document format the clear choice is ODF - a tight and widely-implemented standard. Anything but OOXML.