Wikipedia talk:Line breaks usage

message: Supporters of the rule "Don't use (single, manually entered) line breaks" include:
* Justfred - "Don't put in arbitrary line breaks where they don't belong."
* Rotem Dan (very strongly, I think the markup text should look as close as possible to the text displayed, this eases on finding a specific point in the text by looking at the rendred paragraphs.)
* Eloquence, [use line breaks] makes no sense (see below)
* Martin (after swinging back and forth, I think I'm generally against this now)
* Tannin Extra line breaks make editing painful. 
* Zoe (also very strongly.)
* Hephaestos [single, manually entered line breaks] leave minor changes floating completely out of context with the rest of the material.
* Patrick Changing text into list elements or indenting it becomes cumbersome, the line breaks have to be removed.
* John Owens hates cleaning up when a line break ends up in the middle of a would-be wikilink. (But I'll usually leave them be if they're at least at ends of sentences instead of every 80 characters or less.)
* Camembert (if line breaks are added, the result is awful to read in the edit window, makes some editing trickier, and if anything makes the diff function less useful, not more, because diffs are shown out of context, making them harder to find in the article)
* Oliver P. (Yes, what he said. And what Martin said below. I can't come up with anything original, sorry.)
* bdesham -- yes, what Camembert said.  I'd like to add that I find this really, really, really, really annoying.
* ABCD – what bdesham said
* Vsmith Never used 'em or gave this a thought 'til someone griped at me. Seems a holdover from archaic pre-hrml time? Plus I agree with all those above.
*Bcat (talk | email) 17:22, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Don't-use people

message: Supporters of the rule "Use (single, manually entered) line breaks" include: 
* tbc
* Damian Yerrick
* LDC
* Bryan Derksen
* Eclecticology
* Kowloonese (strongly; it is silly to spend timing doing what the browser does for you, i.e. the formatting. So my main concern left is the quality of the "diff" result.)
** "it is silly to spend timing doing what the browser does for you" sounds like an argument against this rule, not for it --Camembert
*** The browser does the HTML layout for you. It doesn't do the wikitext diffs for you. This argument is about the wikitext, not the result after converting to HTML and normalizing whitespace per HTML rules. --Damian Yerrick (talk | stalk) 03:16, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Use people

message: Supporters of neither rule, both rules, agnostics, etc:
* doom I reluctantly agree that avoiding embedded linebreaks in paragraphs is probably the right way to do it with the wikipedia software, it would be better if the software did not impose the need to be finicky about details like this.  
----
Now, I agree fully with this guideline and all (even though I keep forgetting to practice it :), but I do have one possible objection/question; isn't a soft line break one of those line breaks inserted automatically by word wrapping and a hard line break one of those line breaks inserted by hitting the enter/return key? If that's indeed the case, we want to use hard line breaks and not soft line breaks. If it isn't the case, then never mind. Bryan Derksen
:Maybe the word "soft" should be removed from the rule; many people (myself included) may not have a clear view of the difference between soft and hard breaks.  This is really about nice formatting in general.  One principle in that would be to avoid excessively long paragraphs; if that's done the "diff"'s will fall into place.  Eclecticology
(Justfred) Force users to edit their text in a specific way because the diff function doesn't support sentances, only paragraphs?  And use the fact that the formatter ignores single soft line breaks?  This seems wrong to me.   A paragraph is a paragraph.  Don't put in arbitrary line breaks where they don't belong.  For that matter, I'd like it if the formatter understood single-linebreak-separated lists without needing br tags.  I'd prefer if it were as close to WYSIWYG as possible. --justfred
:I guess this is just a recommendation.  The user can write any way they want to if they don't care about the extra burden on the systems and other users.  It is a courtesy not a mandate.  The diff function needs to work harder and slow down the server if it needs to process a long paragraph versus a short sentence.  Other users can read the diff report easier if the context is narrowed down to just one sentence.  The download time of the diff page is faster if the diff blocks are smaller by eliminating all the unchanged sentences around the changes. Yes, I agree that if the diff function is smart enough, we can do away with this workaround.  But given the situation, this is a good compromise.  -- 63.192.137.21
--------------
This policy is perhaps obsolete now Wikipedia has spiffy side-by-side diff output. -- Tarquin 12:47 Jul 30, 2002 (PDT)
:What it all comes down to is "write short paragraphs for ease of online reading", but that sound point is pretty well hidden in all the verbiage, ironically.  Ortolan88
No, that wasn't the intent of the rule at all.
What we wanted to encourage is frequent hard breaks in
the source text (that is, the text in the edit box),
which make no difference at all in how the article is
displayed, but make it easier to edit in many ways:
First, some editors (particularly in the Unix world)
don't handle long lines well.
It makes diffs faster and smaller and easier to read,
even with the new features.
And it makes it easier to find sentences within a
paragraph, and to rearrange sentences. --LDC
It makes
editing
extremely
tedious
and the
text
becomes
difficult
to read
unless
your edit
box width
happens
to be set
to the
same
size
as the
person
who
edited
the text
before
you.
Often
when the
text is
edited,
the extra
bits are added without adjusting the lengths
of the rest
of the
lines.
This leads to some lines being much longer than other, and this is really
difficult
to read. It's only a problem for editors, but
that is
important enough
to
me.
Don't you think?
Of course
you could
ask everyone
when adding
a few words
to re-edit
the entire
paragraph
so as to
maintain the
arbitrary
maximum line
size
typically of
80 chars.
But this is
tedious.
Note that while
a few
editors
don't
deal well
with long lines
all editors
deal
badly with
this kind of
short line
as used here:
it ends up taking
a whole bunch of extra space
and you end up with a bunch of wasted white space on the right hand side. This happens to me with LDC's edit above - and wasted space is bad UI design. That's why we should write like, well, normal people. This is one of those instances where just because you can do something, doesn't mean that you should. Martin 00:27 5 Jun 2003 (UTC)
: As an example - the above response is mis-indented (it should be at a single level of indentation, as a reply to LDC. However, fixing this is hideously tedious, and it's the single manual line-breaks that make it so. I could solve the problem by indenting LDC's comment instead.... but that's got the same problem. Remind me again how manual line breaks make pages easier to edit? Martin
----
I have also found several instances in articles where a line break is put in the middle of an internal link; this breaks the link. - Hephaestos|§ 18:58, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Other people

message: I also use a line per sentence when adding text, like User:Error.
But I avoid adding line breaks in the middle of a sentence.
My best excuse is that it helps me edit for improved readability -- it makes long sentences (which always hurt readability) stick out like a sore thumb.
Also it helps me entirely avoid the Full_stop#Spacing_after_full_stop controversy.
Probably the real reason I do it is a relic habit from old wiki software whose "diff" made it difficult to find minor changes in a long paragraph.
But what irks me is people who clutter up Recent Changes, making no change other than adding or deleting these invisible-to-the-reader linebreaks (or other whitespace).
--DavidCary 20:25, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  one line per sentence 

message: This page seems to cover the subject in rambling and unnecessary detail. I propose replacing the page with a redirect to Wikipedia:How to edit a page. Please let me have your thoughts. jguk 11:34, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Proposed conversion into a redirect

message: Would somebody care to make Wikipedia:Userboxes for these choices? --Error 03:17, 11 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Userbox

message: I understand that the  tag is invalid XHTML, but it is converted to  upon rendering by MediaWiki. So it's really an aesthetic difference, and in my opinion,  looks much cleaner. (For example, m:Help:Editing#Most frequent wiki markup explained ([#Most_frequent_wiki_markup_explained permanent link]) uses it in one of its wikitext examples.) Is there any consensus on Wikipedia as to which one is preferred? Thanks. —dto (talkcontribs) 06:40, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Lol, do some reading will you. In XHTML you need to close tags which are supposed to be self-closed for the code to pass validation. Just like  isn't valid without a subsequent , you need to write <img src="" />,  etc. STUPID 213.112.137.148 13:16, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: But dto's point is that MediaWiki converts the HTML 4  to the XHTML  when preparing the page for rendering. So it really doesn't matter what you enter, just as the difference between tags and tags does not matter. --Damian Yerrick (talk | stalk) 16:21, 17 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  <nowiki><br></nowiki> vs <nowiki><br /></nowiki> 

message: Please note that this page has been nominated to be consolidated with the primary Manual of Style page. Please join the discussion at the MOS talk page in order to discus the possibility of merging this page with the MOS. Thank you.— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 14:08, 27 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Consolidation? 

message: There is currently an ongoing discussion about the future of this and others MoS naming style. Please consider the issues raised in the discussion and vote if you wish GnevinAWB (talk) 20:52, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: MoS naming style

message: Wikipedia:Don't use line breaks → Wikipedia:Manual of Style (line breaks) —  Consolidating naming per Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style#Poll Gnevin (talk) 16:24, 24 May 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Remove from the MOS? Gnevin (talk) 12:32, 26 May 2010 (UTC)

text: I've marked as essay, no serious edits in over 2 years Gnevin (talk) 13:53, 26 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Move

message: I think it is worth mentioning something about the mw:Visual editor, because it will likely make it largely unnecessary to use the wiki code. So, there would be less reason to worry about it. Helder 12:28, 4 June 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Visual Editor 

message: Please see Help talk:Line-break handling#Let us ignore syntax highlighters that do not accept 
It is a detailed discussion with participation from editors, developers, admins, etc.. Most people in that thread want  used, not . See also: KISS principle. 
See also MOS:SIMPLIFY: "Other things being equal, keep markup simple. This makes wikitext easier to understand and edit, and the results seen by the reader more predictable. Use HTML and CSS markup sparingly." --Timeshifter (talk) 08:41, 11 February 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Line breaks. br variants discussion elsewhere