CSV (well TSV) as a format is a simple as it gets: one special code as field separator, and another one as line/record terminator. Only that CSV/TSV use chars available in text editors rather than the proper (archaic) ASCII C1 codes. Whatever the author has against CSV, I feel like starting a war against CSV is crazy, since any alternative is going to be worse when the problem isn't the format as such, but folks misusing it or using it wrongly (eg. broken XML in RSS, broken JSON, whatever).