But what if you want to use elements like <pre> or <textarea>? How would you put in a line break on the rendered page? I suppose there's an argument to be made

But what if you want to use elements like <pre> or <textarea>? How would you put in a line break on the rendered page? I suppose there's an argument to be made for not rendering line breaks as a space, but such a change to the HTML spec at this stage is probably not going to happen.