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Comment by pwinnski | Hacker News Reader

This reads like a joke.

If you think you can do better than CSV, let's see your proposal. Hint: you probably can't, and if you could, you probably couldn't get Excel to export it, so you still probably can't.

"The status quo is bad, more recent popular formats aren't good enough either, but I don't actually have a specific proposal that's better than all of the above" is a lot faster to read than that article, and says the same thing.

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>If you think you can do better than CSV, let's see your proposal.

I've got one! It's basically the same as regular CSV, but everything is UTF-8, the columns and lines are delineated by dedicated UTF-8 "delineator" codepoints (if they aren't defined in the spec, find reasonable surrogates and use them), and therefore nothing ever needs to be escaped.

More human readable than regular CSV, less prone to error and just as easy to write to in a for loop (easier, in fact, as there are no escapes).

Depending on how Excel handles delineators, it should be able to import it too.

fun fact: ascii (and utf-8) has separators! There's a "file separator", "group separator", "record separator", and "unit separator".|

This whole “problem” with CSV boils down to ignorance of the purpose of ANSI characters below 32. This has been a solved problem for decades.

So... I can't just type up a file in this new format in a text editor, since the dedicated low-byte delineator characters don't have corresponding keys on my keyboard. That makes it not quite as good as CSV for at least one use case, and certainly much less flexible.

Replacing flexible standards with more-rigid standards is always really hard.

> the dedicated low-byte delineator characters don't have corresponding keys on my keyboard

[Alt]-[(NumPad:)0031]

[Alt]-[(NumPad:)0030]

Yeah, not quite dedicated keys. But once you've typed in one of each, you can copy and paste. Somewhat better text editors hopefully display them in some fashion (e.g, NotePad++ shows them as little black blobs labelled "FS" / "GS" / "RS" / "US").

That's a solution for MS Windows computers with extended keyboards only, so still not on my keyboard. The set of keyboards that lack numpads or are not connected to machines running MS Windows is much larger than the set of keyboards without commas.

But yes, nothing is technically insurmountable. It's just hard to imagine a format that requires such efforts overtaking a format that does not.

I wouldn't mind an updated standard to CSV that has the type information in the first line with the column labels. I feel like this is all that CSV is really missing. As a format where you can easily see and interact with the data in plain text if you need to nothing really beats CSV but I believe it could be made better, including strengthening standardization. Eg, a CSV standards version header could be put at the top of the file to minimize import export difficulty.

Amusingly, your sibling comment had an alternate proposal that included two features, but did not in any way address the one thing you suggest is missing.

Replacing a flexible standard with a more-rigid standard is really, really hard.

The current standard already accepts a comment line at the top, so in this case technologically it is easy, far easier than most problems. However, getting a consensus from a committee with bike shedding and all that fun (horrible) stuff is very hard.

Just another confirmation for Betteridge's Law of Headlines

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