Consistent? What do you mean, "consistent"? Sometimes it's comma separated, sometimes it's semicolon separated (depending on the user's locale), sometimes it's separated by tabs (because it's a _C_SV file, yeah, no biggie), no content encoding hint (Unicode? Latin-1251? Win-1252? Nobody knows), not to mention you've written this comment under an article that shows just about the least consistent behavior ever. (Line breaks? Ahahahaha!)

The only consistent thing about CSV is its ubiquity; other than that, it's a hairy, inconsistent mess that appears simple. (Source: having parsed millions of blobs that all identified themselves as CSV, despite being almost completely different in structure.)