> However, if your API ever interfaces with users in a corporate environment, parsing simple comma-separated UTF-8 CSV is suddenly quite beyond the reach of however is nibbling at your endpoint

Excel can directly ingest a CSV file served over an URL as data source, with the Accept header manually set to text/csv.

I wrote a backend once that supported this feature so that management could pull whatever data they wanted off an internal application without pestering me. They could literally take the URL of a page and pull it as a CSV file as-is.

Anybody who knows a bit of Excel can pull that data themselves by following a set of simple instructions.

> Anybody who knows a bit of Excel can pull that data themselves by following a set of simple instructions.

That is very much possible. It is also completely impossible when you live in a country where Microsoft decreed that the C in CSV stands for semicolon; as far as Excel is concerned (no, seriously). Welcome in the Netherlands!

Now whether or not Excel can open a CSV file depends on the locale of the user, which will inevitably vary, and of course, whether they are using Excel at all.

So yes, you could offer just CSV, but not if your user is a spreadsheet jockey and you would like to stay on good terms with your support staff.

For all my life, whenever I File > Opened a CSV file with Excel, all its content ended up in column A. I always have to work via Import Data and specify the file encoding and what the C in CSV stands for.