In my experience, human readable file formats are a mistake. As soon as people can read a single file they think that that's the entire format and that it's okay to write it by hand or write their own code for it. And when everyone writes code based on the just what they've personally seen about a format, everyone is sad. This is why not a single piece of software on earth uses the CSV RFC. This is why people hand you CSVs that don't quote string fields with commas in them. This is why you find software that can't handle non-comma delimiters. This is why you find software that assumes that any field made of digits is an integer and then crashes when it tries to do string operations on it. This is why you find software that can't be used unless you change your computer's locale because the front end understands locales and uses commas for numbers but the backend is running on a server and doesn't know what locales are and now everything is broken. This has happened for every single "human-readable" format in existence: html, markdown, CSV, rtf, json, everything. I consider human readability to be a death knell for a format's chances of broad, easy interoperability. There are certainly other things that can doom a format - parquet is almost too complex to implement and so only just barely works, for example - but I'll take a sqlite database over a csv every single time.
I think a takeaway could also be not to give people options when making a human-readable format. "you always need quotes, they're not optional" solves the comma problem. "the delimiter is always a comma" solves the delimiter problem. json has also fared better than csv, I'd say.
this is only the case because this was allowed from day 1. If no one ever allowed this to begin with, that just wouldn't work. Of course this is speaking in hypotheticals, but my point is a more general one about specifications of human-readable formats. no one ever attempts to use strings without quotes in json, because then you would be incompatible with everything. There's compatibility issues, but they're far more subtle edge cases
