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jsingleton·

This also covers CSV as well as APIs.

Links:

https://openapi.tools/

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180

While using the open API spec is good, I'd say the standardisation of CSV data will have more impact. More of the open data available is in the form of historic reports rather than real-time: https://data.gov.uk/ (e.g. https://data.gov.uk/dataset/27dd8d7f-c58b-4de3-bf0d-81058465...)

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I spent a while looking through the registered birth names data for about 5 years while we were naming our kids. Each year was in Excel sheets, which changed format repeatedly. It was really annoying.

Moving over to providing everything as well formatted CSVs is going to be so much nicer.

I can't find any mention of CSV in the OpenAPI documentation or the first link you provided, can you elaborate a bit how this works?

I think he means that the UK govt has mandated a particular CSV standard for tabular data, at the same time. I think you're right that OpenAPI has nothing to do with CSV.

Yes. CSV with the obvious extra conditions "UTF-8" and "one header row" is fairly interoperable, but note: "when you’re using Excel for Windows to load a file that is UTF-8 without a BOM, you can resolve the display of non-ASCII characters by using the ‘import text’ option". If a Windows user just clicks on the file then sometimes UTF-8 is interpreted as some 8-bit encoding and you get mojibake. Nevertheless, you shouldn't add a BOM because the standard doesn't permit that and it might cause all sorts of problems on other systems.

Mojibake

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake

love this word!

Is that true? Iirc Openapi lets you define schemata for csv payloads in POST body sections. Whether they are validated by the backends is another question...

The page title is actually "Improve CSVs and API descriptions with these Open Standards Board recommendations"

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