What is Markdown Viewer for GitHub?
GitHub renders Markdown with its own dialect, GitHub-flavoured Markdown (GFM), which adds tables, task lists, autolinks and strikethrough to the standard syntax. This viewer uses the same dialect, so you can check that a README, wiki page or issue comment will look right before you commit it. It is especially useful for catching broken tables, unclosed code fences and relative links that behave differently in a repository than in a plain text editor.
Common Uses for Markdown Viewer for GitHub
- Previewing a README.md before committing and pushing
- Checking a wiki page or documentation file for formatting errors
- Drafting an issue or pull request description with tables
- Reviewing Markdown that an AI assistant generated for your repo
Why READMEs Break After Pushing
Two problems show up constantly. First, a table with an uneven number of pipe characters simply fails to render, showing raw text instead of a grid. Second, an unclosed triple-backtick fence swallows the rest of the document into one code block. Both are invisible in a text editor and obvious in a rendered preview, which is exactly why checking before pushing saves a follow-up commit.
Relative Links Behave Differently in a Repo
A link like [docs](./docs/guide.md) works inside a GitHub repository because GitHub resolves it against the repository tree. In any other viewer it may not resolve at all. The rule of thumb: use relative paths for links within the repo, and absolute URLs for anything a reader might open outside it, including images and badges.