You are going to make me give away my future punchline. ;-) The short story is that innerText will include the line breaks that are introduced by text layout. A

You are going to make me give away my future punchline. ;-) The short story is that innerText will include the line breaks that are introduced by text layout. A lot of people call innerText when what they actually want is textContent (which doesn't layout because is just a concatenation of the descendent text nodes)