The icon itself breaks up the formatting of the introduction section of a project.
I think we should have a consistent & standardized badge for the maturity model, and prefer to use it at the start of README files over the cute dragon icons.
I haven’t found badges to be useful myself. Whenever I see them on projects, they’re “passing” so it doesn’t provide any useful additional information.
Thanks darius! My personal suggestion would be to have a consistent badge style + wording.
Yes, the words are always present. But personally I think introductions to projects are most important for people browsing / checking out. The less “what is this”, the more dense with summaries, the better.
Once you know the system, badges/ icons work the same as long as they are designed to be easily readable. Which I argue badges are easier to be made readable than icons, at least at current state.
I partially share this. You would realize a project might be having issue if the badge is no longer “passing”, and you would know there’s some reasonable CI (which may imply tests) when they are showing as “passing”.
In node/ python projects they often use badges to indicate the minimum node/ python version supported, also the latest version of the underlying project, which is helpful at a glance. At least for me, my eyes lands on the titles first, badges second, then the later descriptions.
But yeah I definitely agree that they are overused, especially CI badges. I would not disagree if the consensus falls to “we should just not have either badge nor icon”. But I think badges are a better alternative to the current icon situation.
