The proposed format is reasonably same, but you really want to prevent people from writing them by hand, and adding a bit of metadata to describe the column dat

The proposed format is reasonably same, but you really want to prevent people from writing them by hand, and adding a bit of metadata to describe the column data types at a minimum, and ideally more information such as allowed values, semantics, etc. To that end, I suggest that putting the tabular data file, along with a metadata descriptor file, inside an archive format (zip, tarball, etc.); that would put just the right size speed-bump to encourage accessing the data through tools and libraries (though if someone is just a bit determined, reading and editing the contained data directly isn't actually impossible or forbidden). All that said, if you want a better tabular data interchange format badly enough that you're considering devising one, you should probably look at using something even more featureful, like SQLite: https://www.sqlite.org/appfileformat.html https://www.sqlite.org/appfileformat.html