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.

The Secret World of S5

Hm, I'd somehow missed this before:

S5 is a slide show format based entirely on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. With one file, you can run a complete slide show and have a printer-friendly version as well. The markup used for the slides is very simple, highly semantic, and completely accessible. Anyone with even a smidgen of familiarity with HTML or XHTML can look at the markup and figure out how to adapt it to their particular needs. Anyone familiar with CSS can create their own slide show theme. It's totally simple, and it's totally standards-driven.

Pity I don't have any familiarity with CSS....(Via Luis Villa's Blog.)

A Little Note About Microformats

Further proof that things are starting to bubble: small but interesting ideas like microformats pop up out of nowhere (well, for me, at least). As the About page of the eponymous Web site says:

Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.

The key thing is that they are built around XHTML, which is effectively HTML done properly. Examples of microformats that are based on things that may be familiar include hCard, based on the very old vCard, hCalendar, based on the equally venerable iCalendar, moderately old stuff like XHTML Friends Network (XFN), which you stumble across occasionally on the Web, and the inscrutable XOXO (which I've heard of, but never seen brandished in anger).

That's the upside; on the downside, Bill Gates has started talking about it.