Formatting: Double-space mangled into one at display time

One thing that has been driving me nuts about XenForo is frankly the newline. I press the Enter key twice to start a new paragraph in a post - I do want an empty line between my paragraphs. Well, sometimes, XenForo reacts appropriately, sometimes not. So, my workaround to readability is this:
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Any character will work, I just chose dashes for what I see as 'readability'. Takes less time than waiting for a bugfix :p If somebody wants to file a Xenforo bug, go ahead, please.
 
When needed, try copying from this.



Basically "adding new lines" is the vertical variant of adding horizontal spaces: html also "compresses" these. Normally, when you have full html source control and, for example, you want to control the vertical spacing after a paragraph (i.e. the html <p> element), you'd (=would & should) use a property/attribute like margin-bottom, preferably in your CSS.

Also, when you want to separate two sections of text in your forum message, consider:


which creates a more distinctive boundary when appropriate. It allows an easy addition of zero or one "new line" before and after the line.
 
Erichans this is just another example for how HTML logically desribes a document. Layout for display is orthogonal.

With regard to paragraphs, it would make sense for a forum to parse input and just add paragraph-tags around every block that was separated by double newlines. In terms of HTML, you just want to include the information which content-blocks are paragraphs, and leave the layout to the browser (or explicitly specify it using CSS). You could even have the deprecated style of indenting the first line of a paragraph.

The same thing applies to spacing. In the document, you just have a generic space character. How much space is actually rendered is a question of layout. It seems browsers do NOT distinguish sentence spacing from word spacing, and that's in line with more modern typography, but if you'd want wider sentence-spacing, it would be strictly speaking the browser's job, quite similar to what LaTeX is doing by default when typesetting text.

Now, with Unicode, you have the option to explicitly use space characters of different widths, see above. If you really insist on wider sentence-spacing on a website, that's the way to go. I'd recommend to just forget about it and accept the nowadays common style…
 
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