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I've occasionally wondered why we (programmers) don't take greater advantage of ASCII control codes[1] for structuring data -- many of the pain points of CSV/TSV could be addressed by using US (unit separator) or RS (record separator) bytes instead. You'd still have to handle binary values, but that's a problem shared with CSV/TSV.

[1]: https://ascii.cl/control-characters.htm

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Because most tools don't show them so it's useless. Users don't know what a character even is if they can't type and see it.

That's valid, but it's also tooling/expectation issue -- most users are probably interacting with CSV/TSV through a spreadsheet interface, and don't need to know anything about the internal representation of records.

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