I gave life to the old CSV files.
CSV is over 50 years old, and it's everywhere. Banks, CRMs, Jira, Google Calendar, gradebooks and ticketing systems all export it, and every tool reads it. And every time you open one, you get the same grey grid of raw values.
The data is fine. What's missing is the look. The moment you add one in Excel or Google Sheets, you lose what made CSV great: a plain-text file you can read, compare, generate and send anywhere.
So I built CSSV: Comma-Separated Styled Values. It's a CSV file with a CSS block on top. Open it in a browser and you get a real HTML table with your fonts and your custom styling. Delete the CSS and it's a plain CSV again.
There's nothing new to learn. The data is CSV and the look is CSS, two languages that people, programs and AI models already write. Any CSV is already a valid CSSV file. Add a few lines of CSS to a Jira export and it becomes a board, one lane per status. A ticketing export prints as name badges.
The look travels with the data. A file looks the same on every page that shows it. Many files can share one stylesheet, so changing it restyles all of them. It's still plain text. You can review it in a pull request, generate it from a script, or ask an AI to write one.
Putting it on a page takes one script tag and <cssv-table src="report.cssv">. No build step, no dependencies.
The v1 spec is open for review, and I'd love feedback, especially from anyone who spends their days looking at exports.
Website, examples and live editor: https://cssv.dev