Last modified: 2011-04-14 15:10:53 UTC
Poetry and lyrics cannot be simply entered in wikitext. The only way to do it is by tediously adding deprecated <br /> tags after each and every line. Adding a space at the beginning of each line is no good, because it changes text to a monospace font. Entering a <pre></pre> block is no good, because it changes text to a monospace font and breaks wikitext expansions. So it would be desirable to enter <div style="white-space:pre;"></div>, but this is broken because line breaks in the wikitext are converted to spaces, so all of the lines of a paragraph run together. The solution is to preserve wikitext line breaks in the source code. This would have no effect on display, since the web browser converts any whitespace to a single space, except in blocks that are formatted as white- space:pre in CSS.
Please refer to the Poem extension for a way to do this at present. I do think it would be very sensible to leave the line breaks as-is; is there some reason we strip them?
