> What set of escapes and delimiters could be simpler? Would you rather reserve certain characters, and abandon the idea of holding "just text" values?
There's a lot of design room here.
https://www.lua.org/pil/2.4.html http://prog21.dadgum.com/172.html
I can no longer remember where I saw it (thought it was lua), but I heard the idea to use =[[ ... ]]= and =[[[ ... ]]]= as wrappers (a bit like the qq operator from perl). They can be nested and don't interfere, so =[[[ abc =[[ ]]= ]]]= is a legitimate string.
Except when the compatibility horror comes from Excel violating the standard, but only if you happen to be located at the wrong hemisphere (hello semicolons). So, even if everyone just used Excel, you will still face this issue. Now what?
I am not arguing for another format. I am arguing for using a program to edit these files, to avoid syntax errors and other crap that arises when people do manual stuff that doesn't need to be done manually. And sure the format can stand to be slightly more complex, who cares if you're not editing it by hand.
Ascii text format is simple.
Anything where you have arbitrarily complex structure, why not use a program to edit it? What is the downside of using the right tool for the job? Your text editor is a program. Why tunnel through text and manually edit stuff?
Compatibility horrors from people violating the standard will appear no matter what format you use. That's not fair to blame on the format.
> You have to keep in your head escape rules and exceptions, and balancing quotes and other delimiters.
CSV itself has newlines, commas, and quotations marks for special characters. That's extremely minimal. The only extra thing to keep in your head is "is this field quoted or not".
What set of escapes and delimiters could be simpler? Would you rather reserve certain characters, and abandon the idea of holding "just text" values?
> The whole thing doesn't look human readable or easily navigable for a document of any serious complexity.
> And what's the upside? If more people just used Excel or another spreadsheet program to edit these files, you won't face ANY of these issues. They would eventually converge on a standard format, like they did with HTML.
This sounds like you're arguing for a more complex format! I'm confused.
So again, what is a format that you call simple?