CSV files can be made much nicer by the simple switch to tab-delimited. It doesn't solve all the issues by any means, but makes just enough of a difference to b

CSV files can be made much nicer by the simple switch to tab-delimited. It doesn't solve all the issues by any means, but makes just enough of a difference to be 'okay'. Whatever is used, I like that tab-delimited (or even csv) is a human-readable and always-machine-readable long-term data format in the same way as ASCII (or Markdown etc) is for text. A hundred years from now, assuming the storage medium is still usable, the content should be easily recoverable. That may not be the case with spreadsheet files or other structured data formats.