When you produce or require a “tab delimited” document, are those tabs always represented by 4 ? What happens in other part of the worlds, and what happens when the encoding of the document changes (e.g., text copy-pasted in an HTML form versus UTF-8 .txt files uploaded)?
Here I am not talking about documents generated by programmers. I am talking of documents generated by random users to be used in a web app. One example could be a list of ingredients (tab separated) for a cooking site.
Tab delimited documents should be delimited by the tab character, not by spaces. It’s not done for layout, it’s all about separating content by a delimiter, in this case the tab. It’s just like a comma delimited file – the commas separate the data, but have no meaning other than as separators.