Never really understood the point of these? They started showing up maybe ten years ago, and I must have missed the introductory blog post on them with the rationale.
Guess I can see the utility of having a little stats/props table at the top of a project readme. But the in-line wrapped style and images from an external web service aspects never made sense to me. Why is that popular?
I guess, badges can seem a bit peculiar at first. Showing automatically updating stats (like current version, downloads, build/ci status, etc.) is generally very useful for software projects, and using a badge generation service is an easy and aesthetic way of achieving that.
Personally, I think they also add a pleasant touch of style to a project, since READMEs often have otherwise dry and information-heavy looks. Adding a bit of color never hurt anyone :)
It's easy to hotlink an image into a GitHub readme, and when the build status (etc) of the project changes so does the badge, without updating the readme.
It’s not a RENDERME & using badges and many other images makes it harder to actually read content. If you really want them, badges could be added with the specific settings in GitLab for them, and SourceHut you could attach them in the build phase and push the README via REST/GraphQL API, or you could host a separate site for your project, but badges aren’t adding value to the plaintext of a README.
Guess I can see the utility of having a little stats/props table at the top of a project readme. But the in-line wrapped style and images from an external web service aspects never made sense to me. Why is that popular?