People make fun of the excesses of the XML era, but that would still be an improvement in the state of affairs! Realistically, however, a reasonable format her

People make fun of the excesses of the XML era, but that would still be an improvement in the state of affairs! Realistically, however, a reasonable format here would be CSV/TSV with a bit of escaping, or even something like netstrings[1]. Either would be unambiguous, while retaining the shell-tool-friendly nature of these pseudofiles. [1]: https://cr.yp.to/proto/netstrings.txt https://cr.yp.to/proto/netstrings.txt