> (...) the spirit of markdown would favor something that actually looked like a graph without needing to run it through a renderer, something more akin to ascii art, but (...)
I completely disagree. The spirit of Markdown is to provide something that is a user-friendly, simple and easily works on most cases. The spirit of Markdown is not to bear with substandard, unreadable, and outright unfriendly documents just because ineffectiveness and lack of support for basic features is wrongly interpreted as simplicity.
Markdown supports images. Mermaid is nothing more than a way to simplify how developers can put together and maintain images without requiring specialized editors or additional software.
I completely disagree. The spirit of Markdown is to provide something that is a user-friendly, simple and easily works on most cases. The spirit of Markdown is not to bear with substandard, unreadable, and outright unfriendly documents just because ineffectiveness and lack of support for basic features is wrongly interpreted as simplicity.
Markdown supports images. Mermaid is nothing more than a way to simplify how developers can put together and maintain images without requiring specialized editors or additional software.