Kind of a short sighted take. Sticking special characters that (in many early editors) would be invisible complicates development and maintenance. Even tabs have a visual, albeit inconsistent (if your editor wants to align columns for you) manifestation you can work with.
Technically, XML is superior for data representation on many fronts. But likewise, it is an absolute PITA to maintain without significant editor support.
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Kind of a short sighted take. Sticking special characters that (in many early editors) would be invisible complicates development and maintenance. Even tabs have a visual, albeit inconsistent (if your editor wants to align columns for you) manifestation you can work with.
Technically, XML is superior for data representation on many fronts. But likewise, it is an absolute PITA to maintain without significant editor support.
It is no accident that CSV/tabs 'won'.
Seems like a tooling problem though. I don't think it would be that difficult to have editors draw them in a readable way.
If you are okay with needing tooling to be able to edit half decently then the problem it "fixes" in CSV doesn't exists to begin with
Yeah and many devs often oversee that with having separator, enclosure and escapechar specified and used, it even supports newlines in its cell values