This repo contains assets and data files from Minecraft. This is not an official Mojang repo.
You can load the files from this repo using the cdn, and the root of this cdn is at https://eliaselliotson.github.io/minecraft-assets/.
For example, suppose you wanted to load the 1.8.9 villager skin (as one often does). You could easily do so using the following url:
https://eliaselliotson.github.io/minecraft-assets/1.8.9/assets/minecraft/textures/entity/villager/librarian.png