TSV always struck me as making a lot more sense than CSV. No need to worry about escaping quotes and commas and etc... Just disallow tabs in the data (which shouldn't be necessary anyway) and done.
Good news, ASCII has always had record and group separator characters that for some reason we have all forgotten they exist and nobody would ever use in non-binary data:
hah, I was actually aware of this, ironically because I side-projected an encoding/decoding that "visibled" normally unprintable ASCII characters into printable UTF-8
Maybe we should bring field and record separators back and call it "ascii-separated values" (ASV) lol (because, you know... "as originally envisioned by the makers of ASCII")
The only caveat is the lack of visible printability of those (hence that project up there). It would be neat if (by default) the field separator ASCII character looked similar to a tab (maybe with some distinguishing detail such as a dotted underline) and the record separator ASCII character looked similar to a newline (again, with some extra visible difference, but also including the visible linefeed)
There's probably a font feature that lets you do this
The final issue with it is how in the world would we type those characters?
CSV stopped making sense really fast when commas are needed for thousands’ grouping of numbers or decimals, and what the heck, I even name all my scripts with a starting comma (read that somewhere as a short productivity burst). Anyhow, all my text file shenanigans are tabbed, the infamous \t then needs to be correctly parsed in all scripts which is a hell lot easier.
