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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1745 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 11, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Every person who has been using the Internet for a decade or two should understand why using paragraphs rather than line breaks is important (semantic markup—HTML = meaning and CSS = presentation; writing good HTML creates the proper affordances/hooks for CSS stylesheets and screen-reading programs to latch onto).

What do you mean by line breaks? Are you talking about hitting Enter (which your posts seem to be using in duplicate as paragraph separation, the TTBOMK standard internet practice), or more-special formatting?

@FlyOnTheWall, singular "they" irritates me too (as in, if someone requests to be referred to as "they", I will point-blank refuse). Probably an autism thing.

The BBCode markup language used by most forum software (XenForo, phpBB, etc.) does not create paragraphs, and instead renders everything with line breaks, as you describe. The same is true for imageboard software and WYSIWYG email software. But that is bad formatting. In contrast, the Markdown markup language used by Reddit and by this website enables proper paragraphs to be typed.

Wikipedia:

A paragraph is a self-contained unit of discourse in writing dealing with a particular point or idea. Though not required by the orthographic conventions of any language with a writing system, paragraphs are a conventional means of organizing extended segments of prose.

The stanza in poetry is analogous with the paragraph in prose: related thoughts are grouped into units.

The standard formatting for paragraphs in print is a horizontal space (indent) at the start of the first line, though default CSS on the Internet instead uses a vertical space between paragraphs (like stanzas in print).

A newline is a control character or sequence of control characters in character encoding specifications such as ASCII, EBCDIC, Unicode, etc. A newline is used to signify the end of a line of text and the start of a new one.

The individual lines in a poetic stanza are not separate paragraphs. Rather, they are lines within a paragraph, intentionally created with line breaks rather than being generated automatically by the text-layout algorithm.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

That's two stanzas/paragraphs, each composed of four lines that were created by inserting three line breaks. This is completely different in meaning from eight separate stanzas/paragraphs, or from eight separate lines in a single stanza/paragraph.

HTML specification:

The p element represents a paragraph.

A paragraph, in HTML terms, is not a logical concept, but a structural one.

The br element represents a line break.

CommonMark specification:

A sequence of non-blank lines that cannot be interpreted as other kinds of blocks forms a paragraph.

A line ending (not in a code span or HTML tag) that is preceded by two or more spaces and does not occur at the end of a block is parsed as a hard line break (rendered in HTML as a <br /> tag).

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