Totally unsubstantiated, but my opinion on why we use commas instead of the built in record/field seperator characters is simple: the special ASCII characters d

Totally unsubstantiated, but my opinion on why we use commas instead of the built in record/field seperator characters is simple: the special ASCII characters don't have a cononical printed representation and they don't have keys on a keyboard to make them easy to type. Therefore they're neither human readable nor human writable, and the human interface is really what matters with a plain text serialization format. Edit: spelling