[tbrownaw]

For ASCII delimiters, forbidding ASCII delimiters in data is practical.

Data formats that can't handle recursion are never practical. They only work until they don't, at which point they're entrenched and impossible to replace.

[mantrax3]

You may have heard about spreadsheets or relational databases...

[tbrownaw]

Yes. I've seen spreadsheets where some of the cells contain CSV data. I've heard recent news of relational databases adding support for JSON columns and seen them used to store XML, and know that a LOB field could be used to store an image of another database. I've seen hierarchical key/document databases which contain other hierarchical key/document databases (and relational databases, and anything else you can imagine).