[emersion]

CSV is just an example, data vendors can choose e.g. JSON if they want more a sane and well-defined format.

[still_grokking]

Regarding "sane & well-defined":

http://seriot.ch/parsing_json.php

[pletnes]

Json has many design flaws, e.g. support for large integers, floating point infinity and NaN, for instance.

[shawnz]

It is not a design flaw to make a reasonable choice about what data types you support. Especially given the ones captured in JSON are overwhelmingly the most commonly used and necessary types.

In cases where that's not enough, you could roll your own types by putting the values in plain strings and it would still be strictly more expressive than CSV