Devil's advocate - CSV is superior, because edge case bugs (a comma in the data) are likely to be tested. The edge case bugs in ASCII codes could still crop up

Devil's advocate - CSV is superior, because edge case bugs (a comma in the data) are likely to be tested. The edge case bugs in ASCII codes could still crop up. It shouldn't, but then, valid SQL shouldn't crop up in a web form either. And when it does, we'll need escape codes just like CSV, only it won't be well tested in all the tools (because it's not going to frequently happen). It's like all the OSS advocates laughing at Microsoft's idiotic "My Documents" folder. It's not there because they didn't realise how much trouble it would case programmers, it's there because they wanted for force people to deal with edge cases.