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Good to see this moving ahead, but doesn't a well-defined graph format already exist in Argdown? [0] While its renderer uses auto layouting instead of user defined coordinates, the principle of using Markdown files instead of JSON seems more appealing to me considering the Obsidian/git workflow.

Besides Argdown, Markdown itself provides some built-in features that can be utilised to construct graphs. Coordinates for instance, can be stored as HTML comments or link alt texts, e.g. `[node](# ("x:25,y:50"))`. Edge, shape types and other data could similarly be stored in alt text fields as serialised JSON or in separate blocks using link reference definitions. [1]

One step further, Markdown lists could be used to store subtrees while cycles as Obsidian block links. This also allows you to encode ancestral, sibling and descendant relations:

  - [root](# ("x:25,y:50"))  
    - leaf  
      - [link](#^id)  
    - another leaf^id  
You'd then be able to interleave prose and graph structures in a single file rather than dealing with two separate parsing structures. Even better, the end result would still be Markdown compliant.

[0]: https://argdown.org/

[1]: https://github.github.com/gfm/#link-reference-definition




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