Pekka Väänänen, Aug 19 2021.
This proposal is a response to It's Time to Retire the CSV by Alex Rasmussen and the discussion on lobste.rs. Don't take it too seriously.
CSV files (comma-separated values) are great but sometimes difficult to parse because everybody seems to have a slightly different idea what CSV means. The obvious solution is to transmit some metadata that tells what to expect but where do you put it? Well, how about a ZIP archive?
An archive with two files. The first file, say format.txt
, has the metadata inside and the second one is the original CSV file unchanged. This is still readable by non-technical users because ZIP files are natively supported by both Windows and macOS. People can double click on them like a directory and then double click again on the CSV to open it up in Excel.