I spent a while making a binary format for tabularish documents, and even started on an editor for it. What I decided on after some long months of gradual itera

I spent a while making a binary format for tabularish documents, and even started on an editor for it. What I decided on after some long months of gradual iteration was to give each cell its own header that could contain various forms of type info, flags, and modes, and to define a cell type that described forms of break (space, line, page, etc. - a 16-bit range of break types could be encoded). The document header also described a dictionary mapping for the data so that it could immediately be presented to the editor in a readable form. But now I just use plain old spreadsheets to do things - I obsoleted my own tech, although I like certain things about it. The editing and storage encoding isn't really the problem so much as the integrity of the literals, which a solution like the regex idea could accommodate. I do think that CSV would benefit by having a header area that described the encoding of breaks in cells and lines. Maybe that's the only thing that really needs fixing in it. And if it included arbitrary break levels like my thing and dropped the rectangular row-column shape, it would cover a huge number of documents.