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1. awesome ~ this seems to be in a sweet spot! (yes, mermaid is fine; but often looks bad - esp when visualizing large diagrams)

2. it would be great to have this as a layouting layer for C4

3. which brings me to a suggestion: i think it would make sense to allow for decoupling the topological parts of the language (arrows, groupings, etc) from the layouting concerns (left of, right of, etc)

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Super interesting. So, you'd have something like "use architecture.dsl" (to "load" the C4 model definitions), and then begin to specify layout?

Yes this would be one way. But maybe a suite of plungins that allows other renerers to consume .rel files might make for a better ecosystem.

To explain the use case: One advantage would be: maintain model (and views) in C4, provide layout on top.

We recently generated a big C4 model of the whole company. Good and informative since you can click through it! But it doesn't look nice and doesn't tell a coherent picture visually.

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