I have always wondered why Open Document standard would not be based around HTML instead of inventing new XML schema?
Can someone who has more insight on ODF/OOXML tell me why HTML is not suitable for office document format?
ODF is for publishing, i.e. where you can have separate pages, with footers, margins, absolute position inside page (versus whole document), corrections tracking, authorship, figures.
HTML _can_ give you close result, but this is not HTML domain, hence separate standard.
Embedded editable files, for instance.
Or markup for tracking changes.
Tex might make a good starting point for building a system that _did_ do all of that, but nobody seems to be working on that.
I've often wondered why Microsoft chose to embed a weak implementation of version control into their mutable document format instead of doing something like passing around a signed chain of immutable documents.
Also, if you don't trust the other parties, you can use the compare feature an get a diff of the documents. Keeping your own copy is a easy, simple, way to get a correct view of changes to a document.
You can do a mediocre job of inferring the latter from the former, but for 100% support you need to actually put the notes into the file itself.
Any representation that makes people think "this is a paragraph", "this is a title", "this is a list" and then apply styles to each is an improvement over the current "lets vomit text on a page, then tweak individual sections independently" method endorsed by most word processors.
Tools that do this like (Pandoc being the one I like) do a great job of getting people to think of documents as text that gets styled later.