Re:How about some *helpful* suggestions (Score 1)

Unfortunately (like the Asian example you provide) this approach stops being useful very quickly. Images are also very important, and cannot be easily transformed to a 'simple' format, although you could argue PNGs could be used. However, in the National Archives I currently work at (as a code monkey), a high importance is attached to the look and feel of the original, i.e. they want to preserve the original layout whenever they can. This makes sense, because migration, especially for things like Word documents and databases has a terrible track record over a longer period of time; think 50 - 100 years here. Two or three migrations (and yes, even though using a simple ASCII format seems a solution now, people in 20 years will want something different) on and you've lost important information in the document. One approach we're looking at right now is emulation (and we've got a first version going: http://dioscuri.sourceforge.net/), allowing old software (and documents) to be run on any platform in the future. Of course, this brings along new problems such as storage, updating the emulator, etc.