[wmal]

The author seems to ignore the fact that CSV got so popular because it is human readable. If anyone wanted a binary format there’s plenty of them - most better than this DSV.

Also, I’m on a mobile right now, so can’t verify that, but it seems the format is flawed. The reader decodes UTF8 strings after splitting the binary buffer by the delimiter, but I believe the delimiter may be a part of a UTF8 character.

Edit: just checked and there’s actually no chance that the delimiter the author chose would be part of UTF8 encoding of any other character than the delimiter itself

[zekica]

No, all UTF-8 multi-byte encodings have the most significant bit set.

[tpoacher]

CSV's aren't really readable either though. They're "inspectable", but that's different. So if you want to read them you'll need to either use specific software, or do some preprocessing to align things properly etc ... in which case the extra step of performing a file-wide substitution of the record separator with newlines and unit separator with tabs or sth, isn't a much worse problem.

[postalrat]

I'd say CSVs stuck around because there weren't any other alternatives that could be easily created, appended to, read by different apps.

[boomlinde]

> The author seems to ignore the fact that CSV got so popular because it is human readable.

It might seem that way if you didn't actually read the article:

> So what’s the downside? This custom FEC tooling might give you a hint.

> For starters, it’s rather unreadable when opened in a text editor.