Open Stack

One up side to keeping simple diagrams as ASCII art (and converting
to something more palatable via a Sphinx plugin) is that people
browsing the source code can just read it--this is the same reason
we have a preference for reStructuredText over something more
presentation-oriented like SGML or Tex--without having to perform
additional steps to render it into some other format first or pull
out a Web browser and look for the rendered versions online.
-- 
Jeremy Stanley