Yes. You could get a long way with a text format in which:

-the first line is always a header

-fields are separated by Unit separator characters

-records are separated by Record separator characters

-encoding is UTF8

If you wanted to get fancy you could also have:

-comment lines

-column metadata (e.g. column 0 is an ISO date, column 2 is text, column 3 is an integer)

Both the above could start with a Unicode character unlikely to be used for anything else.

I think that would avoid 99% of the pain of CSV files. The downside is that the use of things like the Unit separator mean that it wouldn't be easy to create/edit manually.

I don't suppose it will ever happen though.

> it wouldn't be easy to create/edit manually

I mean, you'd have to be using a pretty terrible tool for it not being able to handle that, and I suspect if such an approach were to become prevalent, that tool would either fix the glitch or become largely unused.

Are there any editors that let you insert a Unit separator character as easily as a comma?

All of the programmable ones? ;-)

So that's a no then. ;0P

? Quite the contrary. It's more, "all the ones that any craftsman should be using".

A lot of excels and csvs are made by people other than programming crafters.

As with pretty much everything else computing, the world suffers because Microsoft has been dumping terrible tools on it for decades, and people just take their garbage as the way things have to be.

Excel has its advantages, but it is funny the tools people choose to work with. The number of times Access would make more sense...

Didn't they sunset Access in lieu of Power BI Apps or whatever the hell they're calling their shot at no code these days?

Yes indeed. It often means they do extra work because they're using the wrong tools.

But you gotta admit that excel is a pretty terrible tool to hand edit a CSV with... ;-)

But it sounds like a very very good approach.

Yup. I mean, if you're going to go with a text encoding, you might want to, you know, use the features of the text encoding that were put there explicitly for said purpose...

...or you could invent abominations like CSV, TSV, etc. ;-)