Excellent. Much easier than requesting API keys and parsing JSON. But that's just my opinion. CSV is beautiful. Simple and easy to manipulate into some other format if desired.
Re:The US Census now has an API
by fennecfoxen on Thursday June 07, 2012 @01:41AM
(#4077760)
CSV is beautiful - for numbers. When you invoke strings, and quoting, and whatnot, it goes downhill fast. :)
this data is already available as a downloadable file. Check out ftp://ftp.census.gov/ It's CSV, and it's kinda ugly-looking, but it's available.
The 'full' data set is ...rather huge. The full data set for any particular report is rather huge.
The advantage of this API, I expect, is it allows people to make quick, machine readable queries for useful subsets of the data. If you want a JavaScript mashup that tells you the number of people who live on your block, use this. If you want to know the population of every block everywhere for data-crunching purposes, just download the CSV.