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I had a good talk with my ex-wife's uncle about this a few years ago. He's a record's archival specialist in Australia, and they seem to be doing a lot of work with Microfiche. Apparently it lasts quite a long time and is highly dense. They encode data in some sort of an xml format, and the first slide on each sheet has a reasonably explanatory description as to how to decode the data.

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B&W film is the best archival format I've come across, it'll last a century stored in a shoebox in the attic, and you can look at it just by holding it up to the light. That's important; anyone who picks it up regardless of their prior experience will know, this is a thing with information on. Would you even recognize a HD if you'd never seen one before?

I agree - I think this is the route for more substantial (centuries) storage. However, I'd probably wouldn't use xml - some variant of http://ronja.twibright.com/optar/ mentioned elsewhere on this page.

I'd include the definition of a simple machine, and the text of a program written in opcodes for the machine, for decoding.

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