For a lot of people, meaningful space is a hard concept to understand.

It's made worse by the number of applications where they will see spaces reformatted willy nilly (for instance web forms eating their line breaks.

From there explaining there are spaces and tabs, and that both can look the same on screen but they are different is just asking for trouble outside of our circles.

> is just asking for trouble outside of our circles

it's asking for trouble in our circles too. Imagine getting a tab-sep file, opening it up in an editor and having it automatically convert to 4 spaces "because", then sending it back without checking something that doesn't look wrong.

Or an input/editor where the `tab` key moves your focus from the text field to the next button. Like Slack. You can't just hit `tab` in Slack when typing a code snippet for something that needs them like a Makefile.

What is human readable about a tab?

Open up a csv in notepad vs opening up a tsv.

One actually looks like a table the other is a garbled mess.

I think we have different definitions of human readable then. To me, human readable means if I print it in a printer, it loses no fidelity. What you describe is what I would call machine-readable. It is able to be imported into a program. The same that a binary separator would also let it be imported.

Even in your example TSV wins.