[brunokim]

"Broken" is a sliding scale, and it's unfeasible to refuse engaging at all times.

If you are a multi-billion dollar company creating a new integration, you can demand that your small supplier provide an RFC-4180 compliant file, and even refuse to process it if its schema or encoding is not conformant.

If you are the small supplier of a multi-billion dollar company, you will absolutely process whatever it is that they send you. If it changes, you will even adapt your processes around it.

TFA proposes a nice format that is efficient to parse and in some ways better than CSV, another ways are not. Use it if you can and makes sense.

[usrbinbash]

I agree up to a point. It is a kind of tug-o-war, and yes, the weight of each side plays an important role there.

Nevertheless, even in projects where my services are talking to something that's bigger, I will, at the very least ask "why cant it be RFC compliant? is there a reason?". And without blowing my own horn overly much, but quite a few systems larger than mine have changed because someone asked that question.