Meta characters were also added for file, unit, record, and group separators. Some may correctly argue that using these chars to structure data in flat files is a more simple and technically superior solution to the alternatives.<p>Still, people will stick to what they&#x27;re familiar with despite the technical benefits. That&#x27;s why we have CSV, TSV, JSON, etc.<p>I&#x27;d argue that &#x27;most practical&#x27; is whatever format most people immediately understand at first glance. That literally means everybody, not just a small subset of programmers who already use a perticular sytling standard.