Bowerbird@aol.com writes:
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?
Perhaps it's better to think of line-breaks as an arbitrary part of layout, rather than as mark-up. In a markup language you can specify if the value of an element ignores whitespace and line breaks (like html <p>) or preserves them (like html <pre>). But line breaks are treated very differently by text editors. Some text editors and email clients will auto-insert soft line breaks at column markers. This gives the use the illusion of having line breaks but if they send the text to someone who doesn't have this feature the person on the other side will just see extremely long lines which scroll faaaaar off the screen. Older editors like Emacs allow you to auto-insert hard ling-breaks as you type. And then when you edit text, or cut and paste you use a command to "re-fill" the line or paragraph by reformatting the text to break lines at a defined column marker. Different programing languages treat whitespace and line breaks completely differently. Some languages require you to explicitly indicate line breaks with markup like "\n" or ";". Since everyone seems to have a different opinion on how to treat whitespace and line breaks, it's best to specify very clearly how your language or markup treats them. But it would be foolish to treat line-breaks as markup for preserving line breaks for the simple reason that a lot of software out there will simply not respect it as such. b/ -- Brad Collins <brad@chenla.org>, Banqwao, Thailand