[Pxtl]

Either way, regardless of whether it's easier - the software world is driven by the power of plain text. Text is king. Text lets you diff, lets you git, lets you pull-request, lets you grep, etc.

Look at the popularity of Markdown, a syntax that is just "simple html but it's easy to read in plain-text form". Or YAML, which is just "JSON and XML that doesn't make your eyes bleed, but has the worst type-inference ideas ever".

Yes, GUI tools can help. Doing image-links in Markdown is a PITA. Ditto good-looking tables. But still, the idea of "human-friendly-text-first" formats is valid.

Doing the same for UML just makes sense to me.

Now obviously there are implementation details I disagree with, both in the format and the renderer. But the idea is sound.