Reports indicate that when documentation is sufficiently detailed and available in different formats, development efficiency is expected to see a dramatic 50% improvement. However, to include images/charts in Markdown files on GitHub, previously had to embed images.
The good news is that starting today, developers can experience a native feature through GitHub – support for the JavaScript-based Mermaid diagram and flowchart generator.
For GitHub users, this means they can share information through rich visual formats to provide better project management, quality and workflow improvements.
Martin Woodward, director of developer relations at GitHub, explained: Mermaid supports a range of different common diagram types in software projects, ranging from flowcharts, UML, Git diagrams, UX flowcharts, and even the dreaded Gantt chart.
Adding Mermaid to your GitHub docs is easy: when you mark a block of code as a mermaid frame, it generates raw Mermaid syntax. After being passed to Mermaid.js, the browser will turn this code into a chart for rendering.