I have, on occasion, made plain text files with simple diagrams in them using unicode box drawing characters. These copy the advantage of markdown of being read

I have, on occasion, made plain text files with simple diagrams in them using unicode box drawing characters. These copy the advantage of markdown of being readable in a plain text editor. They can also be written in a plain text editor, if a simple macro is written to enable drawing boxes and lines. A program could be written to convert such a diagram to html, to enable more elegant display. The original markdown spec of course included the ability to interleave html, but I always interpreted this as a compromise, a recognition that occasionally, features beyond what is otherwise supported might be necessary. The idea of writing markdown in a WYSIWYG editor, which outputs to a human unreadable format - not just human unreadable like html, but in fact nonsense to any human that reads it - encoded in a generic object format, as an extension to markdown - and to call the result plain text - is quite ridiculous to me. At some point we have jumped the shark, with respect to the purpose of markdown. There is now little distinction from existing document formats, like, say, rtf, which is "plain text" in the same sense as this is. * * * I had thought about calling my extended markdown, with box drawings and the like, sharkdown, for which I at one point even drew a cute logo. I got no farther than this.