ASCII-art is generally difficult to write as denoted by the numerous tools that have been created to generate ASCII-art for markdown. ASCII-art is also much more difficult to edit after the fact.
The spirit of Markdown is succinctly described on DF's Markdown project website.
"Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format."
Mermaid makes it easy-to-read and easy-to-write. ASCII is easy-to-read, but hardly easy-to-write. While Mermaid isn't as nice-to-read, it's still easy-to-read. It's also much easier to modify than ASCII art.
Finally, Markdown itself was designed that while the text is easy to read, Markdown itself is a conversion tool. It literally takes the text and changes it into something that is more readable. This can be seen with how Markdown handles tables. It's literally HTML table tags rather than ASCII designed tables.
This is very much in the spirit of Markdown, and things like this have already been done in the original implementation.
> The spirit of Markdown is succinctly described on DF's Markdown project website.
> "Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format."
The third/fourth person to quote the original article while failing to acknowledge this paragraph from the same article:
> The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions.
Your quote brings up two things that might be in conflict sometimes:
1. Being easy to write
2. Being easy to read
Given that the “overriding design goal” (my emphasis) is to be as “readable as possible”, it immediately follows that (2) takes precedence over (1). Which is why you assertion here:
> While Mermaid isn't as nice-to-read, it's still easy-to-read. It's also much easier to modify than ASCII art.
Misses the point—the original spirit is to be easy to read, and that does (by implication) take precedence over being easy to write.
The spirit of Markdown is succinctly described on DF's Markdown project website.
"Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format."
Mermaid makes it easy-to-read and easy-to-write. ASCII is easy-to-read, but hardly easy-to-write. While Mermaid isn't as nice-to-read, it's still easy-to-read. It's also much easier to modify than ASCII art.
Finally, Markdown itself was designed that while the text is easy to read, Markdown itself is a conversion tool. It literally takes the text and changes it into something that is more readable. This can be seen with how Markdown handles tables. It's literally HTML table tags rather than ASCII designed tables.
This is very much in the spirit of Markdown, and things like this have already been done in the original implementation.