Hi All, Am 26.06.2006 um 11:12 schrieb Walter van Holst:
Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
p.g. introduces its own linebreaks into its plain-ascii e-texts, all without ever entering the markup arena.
and i put in my own line-breaks, right here in these posts to this listserve, again without using any markup at all, just the return key.
Line-breaks are mark-up. They don't add anything whatsoever to the text itself and are completely arbitrarily decided, usually based on the technology that is used to display the actual content. You can deny the difference between structure, content and presentation all you want, but it is perfectly possible to reformat a book using columns instead of lines without changing the actual content. And where will your precious line-breaks go in that case?
In normal prose line breaks generally do not effect the actual content, but in poetry in may be very meaningful. Especially in works where the form of the text is important !! But do not take my word for it. Keith.