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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.

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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?

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