I'm not going to disagree that data formats should undergo a process.... but sometimes they do undergo too much process. Most of the EDI standards, for example,

I'm not going to disagree that data formats should undergo a process.... but sometimes they do undergo too much process. Most of the EDI standards, for example, are a product of a huge amount of committee that sells a lot of standards and are used extensively yet are almost impossible to write a parser for. Edit: obviously this isn't the case, since people have actually parsed it, yet it's a non-trivial thing to do and I have yet to see a solution that isn't horribly specific or a solution that ignores something that might be problematic in non-standard solutions (of which there are a million because of the difficulty involved). A huge amount of domain specificity doesn't help either.