The requirement is on the part of the web browser. Modern web browsers work, such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari. But Internet Explorer does not. The web browser also needs to be able to access the online mermaid renderer at cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/
For an easy introduction, here follows three practical examples using:
Thanks to the growing popularity of mermaid, many plugins already exist which incorporate a mermaid renderer.
One example is the [Atlassian Confluence mermaid plugin](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1214124/mermaid-plugin-for-confluence?hosting=server&tab=overview)
When the mermaid plugin is installed on a Confluence server, one can insert a mermaid object into any Confluence page.
We do not need to install anything on the server, apart from a normal file of html to be reached by a web browser (such as Firefox, Chrome, Safari, but not Internet Explorer). So if you want to really simplify things when testing this out, don't use a web server at all but just create the file locally and drag it into your browser window. It is the browser which does all the work of rendering mermaid!
3. When initializing mermaid using `mermaid.initialize()`, it takes all the `<div class="mermaid">` tags it can find in the html body and starts to render them. This is done like so:
- In early versions of mermaid, the `<script src>` tag was invoked in the `<head>` part of the web page. Nowdays we can place it directly in `<body>` as seen above. However, the documentation still frequently reflects the old way which still works.
- We initialize the mermaid rendering with `mermaid.initialize()` directly in the html code. In principle this could be done through placing `mermaid.initialize()` inside of `mermaid.min.js`. We would then eliminate the need for this explicit line in the html. However, there are use cases where we do want to separate the two steps. Sometimes we want full control over when we start looking for `<div>`tags inside the web page, i.e. running `mermaid.initialize()`, as all `<div>` tags may not have loaded when `mermaid.min.js` runs.
- In the example above, `mermaid.min.js` is called using an absolute path. Even worse, the example includes the mermaid version number which of course will change as time goes by. However, the example makes it easy to understand what is going on - even though it is doomed in a way we do not want in a production environment. When going from testing mermaid out to getting serious with it, I would suggest one of the following approaches for calling `mermaid.min.js`:
