As an anecdote, I actually wanted to use US/RS delimited text at work a while ago to consume XML downloaded from some service. The idea was to use XSLT to convert the data to a sane format that I could easily ingest. As it turns out, that was a no-can-do because XSL transforms are defined in an XML dialect, and XML is not allowed to contain ASCII control characters, not even on escaped form  So you cannot express this transformation to any of the XSLT engines I tested! I ended up using a pair of Unicode control chars instead.
-Truls
