what's a good document type?

I need a kind of document that can be edited on any computer platform without someone having to pay for programs to install.  It needs to work without someone having to lower security settings on their pc.  It needs to allow a person to enter data within specific fields in the document.  It needs to be small enough that people can easily email it as a file attachment.

What is there?

I find that Microsoft Word just isn't generic enough.  We put documents out on the web, and some people cannot view/edit/save Word format.  Or miscellaneous Microsoft formats come in to us that require additional software installed to convert to our current version.

I find that PDF is just plain awful.  The Adobe editor is expensive and a cpu hog.  Documents don't always work correctly, even with Adobe Reader.  I do like Foxit as a generic pdf viewer, but it's impossible to get every program to play correctly with a pdf document that expects fields to be filled in.

I find that Tiddlywiki is a security risk because it requires users to alter their security settings so that the program can save data to its own source file.  Prime virus territory.  Yuck.  Too bad, since I really like the concept of it: an editor embedded within the document itself.

So what options are there?  Flat html provides the forms, the dropdown lists, the radio buttons, etc, but it cannot save the data anywhere.  Argh!  Business has needed a solution to this problem for decades.  Why don't we have one yet?

Haiku

The last incarnation of BeOS appeared on the scene in March 2000, ten years ago. I still have my paid disks somewhere, if anyone's taking count. I paid my money because I really wanted them to succeed. Be was the only operating system that ever caught my attention as thoroughly as AmigaOS had done many years before.

A decade later, we now have Haiku. I installed it today, and I'm posting from it now. I would've been excited to see Haiku show up back in 2000. Today, though, I find myself wondering, "So what do I do with it now?"

The install went okay, but not as flawlessly as BeOS did so long ago. The file reads from cd-rom were slower now, for some reason. Haiku wouldn't put an entry into the boot loader for me, so I had to do that on my own. Nevertheless, it went much better than the latest OpenSolaris install did tonight. (More on that adventure some other day.) The Mozilla port is working passably well for me, as it allows me to post on LiveJournal.  The auto-refresh, however, is slow enough to cause seizures when using the "Rich text" interface on LiveJournal. That's some painful blinking. The web browser won't load Facebook at all, but that's probably a point in its favor, to be honest.

I give the Haiku developers high marks for getting this far in their recreation of BeOS! I'm just not sure if I'll use it for anything more than a nostalgia fix. :(  Still, a stroll down memory lane is enjoyable every once in a while.  :)

(edit)  P.S.  I forgot to mention the relevance of the new name, Haiku.  The original BeOS used error messages for its web browser that were written in haiku poetry format.  http://www.8325.org/haiku/