.... with a note underneath urging readers not to copy and paste the character because it's only the graphical representation of it, not the thing itself.

Perhaps a more salient example might be CSV nested in CSV. This happens all the time with XML (hello junit) and even JSON— when you plug a USB drive into my LG TV, it creates a metadata file on it that contains {"INFO":"{ \"thing\": true, <etc> }"}

> The entire argument against ASCII Delimited Text boils down to "No one bothered to support it in popular editors back in 1984. Because I grew up without it, it is impossible to imagine supporting it today."

There's also the argument of "Now you have two byte values that cannot be allowed to appear in a record under any circumstances. (E.g., incoming data from uncontrolled sources MUST be sanitized to reject or replace those bytes.)" Unless you add an escaping mechanism, in which case the argument shifts to "Why switch from CSV/TSV if the alternative still needs an escaping mechanism?"

In Windows (and DOS EDIT.COM and a few other similarly ancient tools) there have existed Alt+028, Alt+029, Alt+030, and Alt+031 for a long time. I vaguely recall some file format I was working with in QBASIC used some or all of them and I was editing those files for some reason. That was not quite as far back as 1984, but sometime in the early 1990s for sure. I believe EDIT.COM had basic glyphs for them too, but I don't recall what they were, might have been random Wingdings like the playing card suits.

Having keyboard shortcuts doesn't necessarily solve why people don't want to use that format, either.

The keys would be something other than those, though. They would be: CTRL+\ for file separator, CTRL+] for group separator, CTRL+^ for record separator, CTRL+_ for unit separator. Other than that, it would work like you described, I think.

> But, like many problems in tech, the popular advice is "Everyone recognizes the problem and the solution. But, the problematic way is already widely used and the solution is not

This is unfortunately common. However, what else happens too, is disagreement about what is the problem and the solution.

It's more like, "because the industry grew up without it, other approaches gained critical mass."

Path dependence is a thing. Things that experience network effects don't get changed unless the alternative is far superior, and ASCII Delimited Text is not that superior.

Ignoring that and pushing for it anyway will at most achieve an xkcd 927.