3 ms·
I'm not sure of the origin of the convention, but using two newlines consistently to mark new paragraphs (rather than indentation or just one newline) seems awf
by telemachos 17y ago
I'm not sure of the origin of the convention, but using two newlines consistently to mark new paragraphs (rather than indentation or just one newline) seems awfully common to me in technical writing. So the Markdown rule has always made sense to me. Or to put it another way, it was immediately natural to do it that way.
Edit: to answer the question of the comment below this, poems need to be handled specially in Markdown as in HTML. It's an issue more generally, and I think that the standard solution is <p> for the poem as a whole and <br> (or <br /> depending on your markup flavor preference) for the lines. It's a known thing: http://blog.signified.com.au/a-poem-element-for-html5/ http://blog.signified.com.au/a-poem-element-for-html5/
- nollidge 17y agoBut what if you want a newline for a reason other than for paragraphs, like a poem or something?
- technomancy 17y agoThen you end the line in two spaces.
- StrawberryFrog 17y agoHow obvious!
- nostrademons 17y agoI always just indent poems 4 spaces, making them into preformatted text. In published work, poems are usually set apart from the prose and rendered in a different font anyway, so this seems natural enough to me. Courier isn't exactly my first choice for a poetic font, but it's good enough and gets the formatting across.