Last modified: 2013-01-14 17:25:11 UTC
When typing multiple blank lines in source the parser should treat them like a single blank line, e.g. starting a new paragraph, like in other popular markup languages like LaTeX. The current behavior is that the first blank line starts a new paragraph, the second blank line adds a <br> HTML tag, the third blank line starts a new paragraph again and so on. This is counterintuitive since it leads to nonuniform vertical spacing (about half a line for new paragraphs produced by odd-numbered blank lines, a full line for the <br> tags produced by even-numbered blank lines), therefore rendering this method useless to produce defined amounts of vertical spacing. Needless to say its typographical nonsense to produce vertical space by repeated linebreaks anyway and its bad style to do it in HTML, too. For possible effects of such a fudamental change to the MediaWiki parser see the discussion here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technical%29#Handling_of_blank_lines_in_Wikipedia_syntax Basically the only case where two blank lines are actually used to achieve a larger vertical spacing is before {{stub}} templates. These templates could be easily adjusted to adopt to a potential change to the parser.
Hi Eduard. Thanks for taking the time to report this! This particular problem has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further issues you find. See bug 9651 comment 7. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 9651 ***
