> In hindsight, semicolons are the better choice, given that commas are common in many languages as decimal separators.

Or a pipe. Or the unprintable “field separator” character.

> I don't know where there's never been some effort to create a "CSV format specification"; for example the first line could indicate quoting, delimiter, etc. style used in the file.

Fundamentally CSV or any delimited format requires agreement between parties for interchange. At that point standards don’t really help because the parties can just agree to anything that works.

> Guess it's never been big enough of a problem for people to take action. "Good enough" (or rather, "not bad enough").

Exactly.