[pmwiki-users] Annoying line break issues.

[Petko Yotov]

On Thursday 12 August 2010 18:43:49, Paul Gupta wrote :
> Just curious pmwiki-users! Why isn't this the *default* behavior?

For historical and compatibility reasons. 

HTML, the markup language in which web pages are displayed, outputs 
consecutive lines of text as being a paragraph, and browsers merge and wrap 
lines together on output. 

Moreover, at the beginning of wikis, text editing in browsers wasn't the same 
as today, edit forms didn't have automatic word-wrap (sometimes editing even 
required using an external text editor). Editing long paragraphs was difficult 
unless they were split in several lines. 

Most early wiki packages (UseMod/C2/Meatball, Mediawiki/Wikipedia, PmWiki, 
Dokuwiki...) still have this feature by default, and many pages of wiki text 
were written this way.

Petko