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While I can see how point-and-clickers love things like this, I prefer building connections using markup. So things like Graphviz, PlantUML, and Mermaid appeal to me. However, they leave a lot left to be desired in terms of simplicity. Wouldn't YAML or something similar be better at representing connections, and just have some markup options for types?

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If you are going to let the program do the layout automatically, then graphviz dot already does really good, right?

I think the reason people make these projects is specifically because they want to manually place some nodes at particular 2d positions, which I think is a little difficult if you are just recording nodes and connections. (I think many people are not as excited about solutions like "just use a bunch of invisible edges to enforce additional position requirements" as us).

We think maybe we should add a layout alg. based on the input being relative or absolute grid position (plus maybe unconstrained nodes). Someone should create a summer intern project to get this started.

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