US-ASCII only has four information separators, and I believe they can only be used in a four-layer schema with no recursion, sort of like CSV (if your keyboard

US-ASCII only has four information separators, and I believe they can only be used in a four-layer schema with no recursion, sort of like CSV (if your keyboard didn’t have a comma or quote or return key). When you need to pass an object with records of fields inside a field you’re out of luck, and everyone has to agree on quoting or encoding or escaping again. I think SGML (roll your own delimiters and nesting) was pretty close to the Right Thing,™ but ISO has the specs locked down so everyone had a second-hand understanding of it.