If you 'fool around' with CSV programmatically (say, from a Perl script), XML might ba a way to go even now. There are nice libraries/modules/whatever for XML parsing for various languages (both scripting and 3GL).

It seems that currently half of total WWW content is about XML and related stuff, but a good place for a novice to start might be O'Reilly's www.xml.com (see in particular 'Essentials' menu on the left).