> Similarily there have been many tools that let you add so-called ASCII-art diagrams to Markdown documents. here-in is the nub. these are self contained(/embe

> Similarily there have been many tools that let you add so-called ASCII-art diagrams to Markdown documents. here-in is the nub. these are self contained(/embeddable?) editors of what is essentially non-textual content. there's a concealed inner data-model which is rendered/transpiled into text. i far far far far prefer a text mark up, which is easy to directly edit, which is fairly readable on it's own (imo mermaid reads very nicely). maaking the inner data model both explicit directly workable like this is ascendant beyond compare. mermaid also has predictable rendering rules, where-as there's much more author's opinion/whim about crafting ascii-diagrams, which are open ended. this makes it more predictable as a reader, with diagrams following common layout & flow patterns that one can come to expect. the other boom to mermaid is it's not that hard to parse. i have investigated how available the mermaid team makes the parser but having a relatively-simple well-specified machine readable format opens so so many doors. absolutely the right choice using human editable text markup inside human editable markdown.