Last modified: 2014-11-18 18:07:09 UTC
Tutorials like [[mw:Help:Formatting]] state that a single new-line will have no effect, however, that is not always the case. Single new-lines after block-level HTML elements might result in unnecessary <p> tags being created: while <div>foo</div> results in just that, <div>\nfoo\n</div> will result in <div><p>foo</p></div>. This can be very confusing because some CSS attributes of the div tag will have no effect (they will be overwritten by <p> rules in some CSS file). See the link for an example.
It is worse than it seemed: two line breaks *anywhere in the text* will cause a <p> and a </p> to appear at the line breaks. The following will appear unchanged in the rendered page: <div>A B C</div> This, however: <div>A B C</div> will appear in the output as <div>A <p>B</p> C</div> See [[hu:User:Tgr/p]] for a test case.
However, it seems like <div> A B C </div> will result in <div>A B C</div> It's an important bug, I wonder why there is as little activity.
Because 1) it's not important, it's not just rare but often unnoticeable when it occurs, and 2) mucking with our atrocity of a parser is not something anyone wants to do.
1) It was important for me ;-) For the anecdote, I used to make a very simple template, who takes one or more paragraphs, and displays them with a <span> at the beginning, surrounded by a <div> : <div><span>foobar</span> - {{{1}}}</div> which, with the first parameter A \n B \n C results in <div><span>foobar</span> - A <p>B </p> C</div> which isn't unnoticeable at all. If I hadn't asked for help in Wikipedia-fr, I'd never know that leaving a newline after the <div> and before the </div> will fix this. In fact, it's above all surprising. 2) That's an argument, which I can easily understand ;-)
Note: This is partially (?) a duplicate of bug #5718
Punting this to the new parser Brion has under development.
*** Bug 53043 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
