Yes, but that also interferes with portability. I’ve written a lot of APIs. I generally start with CSV, convert that to XML, then convert that to JSON. CSV is

Yes, but that also interferes with portability. I’ve written a lot of APIs. I generally start with CSV, convert that to XML, then convert that to JSON. CSV is extremely limited, and there’s a lot of stuff that can only be expressed in XML or JSON, but starting with CSV usually enforces a “stream-friendly” structure.