[rjbond3rd]

> So what is the purpose of replacing a common format with one that wastes space repeating labels?

Some time ago, we had to migrate dozens of HTML forms from legacy servers. We ended up implementing a generic forms handler to process all form submissions.

Initially, we logged all submissions to simple tab-delimited files. But as it turns out, some HTML field types, when left blank by the user, leave no trace in the query string.

So plain tab-delimited was not an option, and the answer turned out to be exactly this format.