The way to do it is to use break tags only where you want to actually begin a new paragraph and to let the local browser decide the rest. One of the more powerful ways of influencing the look of a page is the overall layout of the text. These can be defined in absolute terms or in elastic form as percentages of screen width. There are many good uses of tables such as containing the maximum page width to prevent lateral scrolling, grouping and positioning bodies of text, and in-setting images into text. Often the right way to lay out text in print is the wrong way to do it on a web page, and tables permit people to carry over ideas about layout from the print world to the screen whether or not they belong there.
Columns are a good example.
Tables are the means we use to define multiple columns of text down a page. We are all used to the very nice look columns give to newspapers and magazines, and indeed they can be used quite elegantly on web pages when used correctly. People can read printed pages faster with columnar text because the eye doesn't have to scan laterally. The same is true on the screen up to a point. However there is a major difference.