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I don't think anyone wants tabular data. They want to ingest it into a system so they can query it, or join it, or aggregate it. They want to get rid of tabular

I don't think anyone wants tabular data. They want to ingest it into a system so they can query it, or join it, or aggregate it. They want to get rid of tabular data as quickly as possible Data at the boundary must be validated, a file format can't do that for your. Semantics is harder than syntax and you can't push every problem to that level.

ACow_Adonis 5y ago
yeah, um, my life is in tables (stats, finance, etc). while csv is less than optimal, it's always worked out in practice for me (because we still have to validate anything of significant size and nothing finance or city/nation sized should generally be edited by hand anyway, and errors are everywhere independent of format). honestly, my bigger nightmare has been people trying to put things into something like xml... edit: not that there aren't huge problems with the csv/excel/database software and interaction: generally I just end up having to assume everything is text and defining type information my end afterwards on successful parsing
barrkel 5y ago
We've had XML for decades and the default interop is still tabular data - probably in large part because unless you go into non-standard extensions, tabular data is the easiest thing to get from a database query. Spreadsheets haven't exactly gone away either.
Sharlin 5y ago
And the data in the system is… almost always tabular? Either Excel (which runs half the world) or RDB/SQL (which runs the other half).
hermitcrab 5y ago
It's tables all the way down...
hirundo 5y ago
The finance world runs on tables. They want to ingest it, query it, join it, aggregate it ... and look at the result in tables. Tables are everywhere, and a generic tabular format is constantly useful for a la carte one off spontaneous data processing. I love strict schema validation as much as the next guy, but sometimes you just want to cut and paste a table.

ACow_Adonis 5y ago

yeah, um, my life is in tables (stats, finance, etc). while csv is less than optimal, it's always worked out in practice for me (because we still have to validate anything of significant size and nothing finance or city/nation sized should generally be edited by hand anyway, and errors are everywhere independent of format). honestly, my bigger nightmare has been people trying to put things into something like xml... edit: not that there aren't huge problems with the csv/excel/database software and interaction: generally I just end up having to assume everything is text and defining type information my end afterwards on successful parsing

barrkel 5y ago

We've had XML for decades and the default interop is still tabular data - probably in large part because unless you go into non-standard extensions, tabular data is the easiest thing to get from a database query. Spreadsheets haven't exactly gone away either.

Sharlin 5y ago

And the data in the system is… almost always tabular? Either Excel (which runs half the world) or RDB/SQL (which runs the other half).

hermitcrab 5y ago

It's tables all the way down...

hirundo 5y ago

The finance world runs on tables. They want to ingest it, query it, join it, aggregate it ... and look at the result in tables. Tables are everywhere, and a generic tabular format is constantly useful for a la carte one off spontaneous data processing. I love strict schema validation as much as the next guy, but sometimes you just want to cut and paste a table.