<story><title>Time to retire the CSV?</title><url>https://www.bitsondisk.com/writing/2021/retire-the-csv/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>izietto</author><text>&amp;quot;In favour of what?&amp;quot;, that is the matter.&lt;p&gt;CSV is a format more for humans and less for machines, but that is the use case: a format that is good enough to be compiled by humans and read by machines. At the moment there aren&amp;#x27;t many alternatives.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>masklinn</author><text>And CSV can be consumed and produced by spreadsheet software, which is useful to critical in many contexts where CSV is part of the pipeline. There the alternative would be to use xlsx files which… isn&amp;#x27;t necessarily any better.&lt;p&gt;Until someone gets &lt;i&gt;excel&lt;/i&gt; to ingest and produce something in a better format, we&amp;#x27;re pretty much stuck.</text></comment>
<story><title>Time to retire the CSV?</title><url>https://www.bitsondisk.com/writing/2021/retire-the-csv/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>izietto</author><text>&amp;quot;In favour of what?&amp;quot;, that is the matter.&lt;p&gt;CSV is a format more for humans and less for machines, but that is the use case: a format that is good enough to be compiled by humans and read by machines. At the moment there aren&amp;#x27;t many alternatives.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>acwan93</author><text>Also, &amp;quot;will the other side adopt it?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;After working with so many retailers and online sales channels, things that are considered &amp;quot;legacy&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;outdated&amp;quot; by the HN crowd doesn&amp;#x27;t seem like it will go away unless both sides make a change. There are numerous articles posted on HN about how &amp;quot;FTP is dead&amp;quot; or no one uses it anymore, when it&amp;#x27;s far from the case.&lt;p&gt;Even Amazon&amp;#x27;s marketplace and vendor files are still using SFTP and EDI files. They&amp;#x27;ve recently made changes, but it&amp;#x27;s been slow and hasn&amp;#x27;t had widespread adoption.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s also the universality and &amp;quot;simplicity&amp;quot; CSV provides to the non-computer literate, and convincing them to make a change to a new standard provides itself some non-technical challenges. CSV is a bad standard, but it&amp;#x27;s the best one given what it does and its flexibility.</text></comment>