As a 20 year programmer of power programs used in the space race on the one hand and fast 3D games on the other, I have always advocated using plain ASCII for all documents (including even those used by C++ and assembly code to drive speed sensitive applications in real time). Certainly all word processing and related documents should be easily parsed. HTML is a good example. Documents from Microsoft Office products are bad examples.

Why should we have to use Microsoft products (or any one company's products) to read, write and print a document? I resist using MS Word as a bloated and too often changed application that uses propriatary data that can not be fully parsed by other programs.

To the quest for more open source operating systems and applications I add the need for more open source data.