I find ASCII diagrams to be the opposite of Markdown. Markdown isn't perfect and so that is where extensions come into play, but ASCII diagrams are more like man pages. I think ideally a diagram markup software would use YAML or some other similar convention to show hierarchy while still be readable. Typing and editing ASCII diagrams by hand is simply not convenient.
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I find ASCII diagrams to be the opposite of Markdown. Markdown isn't perfect and so that is where extensions come into play, but ASCII diagrams are more like man pages. I think ideally a diagram markup software would use YAML or some other similar convention to show hierarchy while still be readable. Typing and editing ASCII diagrams by hand is simply not convenient.
The only tool that I know of that uses YAML for diagrams is Ilograph: https://www.ilograph.com/
But yeah, ASCII for diagrams seems like the worst of all worlds: manual layouts, slow to create, impossible to maintain.
On YAML-like diagrams, I think you are looking for mermaid [1]. I wrote down here [2] how typograms compare to mermaid [2] in terms of trade-offs.
[1] https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid [2] https://code.sgo.to/typograms/#related
As much as I like Mermaid or PlantUML (more familiar with the last one), how is it YAML or YAML-like?