mermaid.js

markdown (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown) is a wonderful technology. so I was excited when a colleague told me there was a markdown language for graphs.

mermaid (https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid/), which is a javascript library and a CLI (https://github.com/mermaid-js/mermaid-cli), syntax looks like this:

graph LR Beginning --> Middle Middle --> End which is rendered into this:

graph LR Beginning --> Middle Middle --> End

the LR part tells us it’s going left to right. we could swap in TD to make it go top to bottom: