Any idea why Answers is running paragraphs together?

Double newline (ie, a blank line) used to be enough of a hint that our text was supposed to start a new paragraph at that point. This no longer seems to be true.

Somewhat vexing.

(Preview shows whitespace above and below "Somewhat vexing." I expect it to vanish when I submit.)

Comments

[kelseymh]

On a side note, your test with the answer text body itself "failed" (it didn't do what you expected :-) for a related, but different reason.

The forum topic, Questions, and Intructables Steps interfaces do not use the new and buggy "plain text" box. They only bring up the Rich Editor, with an option (that little triangle) for you to hide the buttons.

Thus, when you're typing in your Question text, you are in the "rich editor" already, and it continues to treat carriage returns as line breaks (not as proper paragraph tags, but that's a separate issue).

[orksecurity]

Ah; I was wondering. So... Given a fast connection, I should probably stick with the rich editor until the plaintext is made to work properly.

Annoying, but I guess I can live with it for now.

[kelseymh]

Annoying indeed. I've written several walls of text because I keep forgetting to switch. And the switch itself is buggy :-( [ Repeat three times :-) ]

[Re-design]

Or just click on "rich editor" after you click on "answer".  I'm looking for a way to make "Rich" the default.

[kelseymh]

Contact Matt and Rachel. The reason they made this change is that the "Rich" editor is very slow to load because of all the icons and JavaScript cruft. I've suggested to them the option of using just the Rich editor, but having the controls "hidden" by default (that little triangle icon). Haven't heard back from them on that idea, and I don't know what other bugs they're trying to fix right now.

[orksecurity]

Given that someone must be explicitly doing additional work to remove the line breaks, it seems to me that the basic submission form ought to get _more_ basic and become even faster-loading if this (mis)feature is removed. The other alternative would be to ask whether the rich editor ought to be made less rich. Fancy is nice, but the goal is to communicate, and text does that...

[kelseymh]

No. No one is doing that work. The new default interface assumes that you are typing raw HTML. The HTML spec treats all whitespace (N spaces, tabs, carriage returns) as a single blank space. So all the "editor" has to do is to take exactly what you typed, save it into the database unprocessed, and when it is read back out and rendered you'll get the GIANT WALL OF TEXT.

[orksecurity]

Ah; I was wondering. So... Given a fast connection, I should probably stick with the rich editor until the plaintext is made to work properly.

Annoying, but I guess I can live with it for now.

[Jayefuu]

The new rich editor. When not in rich editor mode you're in html source mode. To get line breaks you need to use the html tag for a line break.

[orksecurity]

I'm not convinced it's true...

This sentence was preceded by a <p>, which should be a blank line.
This sentence was preceded by a <br>, which should be a line break. Both appear as line breaks.

I can double up those tags to get an actual blank line, but that's rather ugly. How Hard Could It Be to recognize Newline Newline in the text and Do The Right Thing?

[steveastrouk]

SO
You can get a line break like that ?

The Rich editor locks up my work PCs now, and I haven't a clue why.

Steve
Thanks for the tip.

[kelseymh]

Read the HTML specification. All whitespace is collapsed to a single blank. HTML is a content-based document markup language, not a graphical presentation system.

Paragraph marks are instructions to the client (your browser, for example) that a new block of text is starting, and it should do whatever it needs to do to make that clear to you.

An "extra blank line" is a one choice that a client could make, but not the only one. If you want to force it to do that, for your own clarity of reading, then you can write a CSS fragment and configure your browser to use it.

In Firefox, the default behaviour is that paragraphs are separated by an extra half-line. Look closely at the interline spacing within each of these paragraphs, and compare that to the gap between successive paragraphs.

Line breaks are a presentation issue, or a content-based notation for literal text (such as software source code, poetry, etc.). Clients are discouraged from collapsing multiple line-breaks.

Forcing what you think is right on everyone else is part of what's wrong with all the "graphic designers" trying to use content-based markup for graphics.

[steveastrouk]

Who, in their right mind, would expect to have to understand the HTML spec, when their expectation from a million decent BBs is that a CR works as a CR ? Steve

[kelseymh]

:-D I fully agree. Any sensible "plain text" interface should treat carriage returns literally, processing them into <P> tags (or wrongly into <BR>'s as is done here).

The current situation with the new "plain edtior" box is demonstrably a bug.  Both Matt and Rachel know about it (though I wish they'd post something), but I don't know when they'll roll out a fix.

What Ork seemed (to me) to be talking about was that the <P> tag itself should be rendered as two new-lines.  That's not necessarily correct, and requires some understanding of HTML to realize why.

[orksecurity]

Ah; I was wondering. So... Given a fast connection, I should probably stick with the rich editor until the plaintext is made to work properly.

Annoying, but I guess I can live with it for now.

[lemonie]

Yes, it's a fault of sorts. The previous answers give you the current solution. L