Simon Willison argues that XHTML works good as the storage format for your content. This is exactly the type of thoughts I had when I decided to re-build protocol7 some time ago. Before, I had a home-made XML format that I used to store all my content. This was then transformed using XSL-T to the HTML on the site. As time had passed, my XML format had grown to handle all my different needs, but what I was doing all along was to build my own copy of XHTML.
So, for the current version of protocol7 I keep all content in XHTML directly. When I need to do site-wide changes I have a XSL-T based tool that I run on all files automatically. Works perfect for me and I would recommend anyone to try it for your static content.
tags: HTML/XHTML