Re:Data Decay, Readability, and ASCII text. (Score 1)

Regarding *ML vs. plaintext, that's exactly the point. XML/SGML/HTML is plaintext--but with added metadata about the document. A document in Microsoft Word format may or may not be readable in 50 years. Since it's a proprietary format, information stored within the document may be untranslatable. On the other hand, the markup languages store the information about the document in a readable form. as long as the Document Type Description (DTD) exists somewhere the file will be readable as long as the text.