Looks like a good idea overall. Getting a format like this widely accepted would be tricky. Good tools that use it would certainly help. A few comments/quibble

Looks like a good idea overall. Getting a format like this widely accepted would be tricky. Good tools that use it would certainly help. A few comments/quibbles concerning the format itself: (1) It think the realities of the modern world are such that you'll need to embrace Unicode a bit more warmly and deal robustly with files containing non-ASCII characters. (Some of those ordinary text editors you want to use will do UTF-8 transparently.) I would suggest: - Officially specifying UTF-8 as the default character encoding, to be used if no character encoding is specified with some other mechanism. - Allowing specification of a different encoding within the file format. (You already have an HTTP-style header; you could use a Content-Type line to specify encoding in the same way HTTP does.) (2) You want to be editable using a standard text editor, but you allow null-terminated data as a type. You can't do both of those. (3) You're using "," as a separator with lower precedence than ";". That goes against common usage in both programming languages and English text. Also your header, following the HTTP convention, is "key: value". Putting those together, doesn't it make more sense to do something like this: Field_name:Type,Type; 2nd_field_name:Type Etc. (The above looks more natural to me, anyway.) (4) Your escaping looks odd. The explanation about awk doesn't quite do it for me. Why the strings of "$" and "%"? To put it differently, why not use escapes in a more traditional style, something like the following? ; %; , %, : %: % %%