Sometimes you want to write something with broken lines and you write in the editor:
That’s right I’m Sokka
It’s pronounced with an Okka
Young Ladies, I rocked ya!
But it ends up looking like this:
That’s right I’m Sokka It’s pronounced with an Okka Young Ladies, I rocked ya!
The fix is to add two spaces between the final character and the carriage return.
I don’t understand what the problem is. CR should be easy enough to translate, and the users intentions are clearly confirmed because they’re looking right at what the expect it to look like when they hit submit.
Why does the user have to add two spaces? Why is the universe like this?
Edit: Holy Shit, look, I’m just an idiot typing text expecting WYSIWYG and I don’t see a good reason for why I’m not getting it other than that programmers lack theory of mind.
If you mean here on Lemmy or other markdown based sites, I think the reason is that it would become incoherent in terms of the HTML it generates.
HTML is supposed to be a format that describes meaning, not presentation. The meaning is that Lemmy comments consist of paragraphs (p elements) like any piece of text does. The way to start a new paragraph is to type two newlines in a row.
On occasion text isn’t divided into paragraphs, like your example of poetry. The way to represent that meaning in HTML is a br element. You already described how to generate that in Markdown. But that is a rare special case. Makes sense that it requires special syntax so people don’t do it accidentally.
Old forum software like phpBB or SMF worked the way you imagine. If I am not mistaken they translated a newline in the BBCode to an HTML br element, unfriendly to screen readers and automated technologies in the ordinary case where text was divided into paragraphs.