Isn't this a bit silly?

[Marauder]

Have you ever noticed that in many WYSIWYG editors, like DW and FrontPage (gag), that the enter key creates a <p> instead of a <br>. Wouldn't the logical thing to do would be to make it create a <br>, or is that just me?

Before, I had always done text in Notepad, but then I figured it'd be easy to just type it out in Dreamweaver as I made the layout. It was. However, I became confused the first time I hit enter, because I saw the text drop down two spaces, and I noticed that it had created a paragraph instead of a <br>, which seemed like the logical thing to do. After expirementing for about 10 seconds, I figured out that the <br> tag could be made using shift and enter.

I just thought it was a bit silly.

[mole]

I guess they're just following the convention used by most WP & DTP programs i.e. Enter=New Paragraph and Shift-Enter=New Line

[Marauder]

Yea, I know, but it doesn't seem logical. I see tons of webmasters with lots of unecessary HTML because they haven't figured out that ****+enter makes a <br>. Instead, they have tons of paragraphs (they set the margins to 0) that increase loading time and are a major b*tch to edit.

[europeforvisitors]

It makes perfect sense for the "enter" key to create a new paragraph. For one thing, that's been industry-standard behavior since the earliest days of the word processor.

Just as important, it ensures that paragraphs of text will be separated by white space (and therefore readable).

[SlowMove]

It should really be something that can be configured as an option. I use DW for prototyping, then move the file to another editor(UltraEdit) to modify the code, and then bring it back into DW to use as a template. The program is great for some things, but not too good at everything.

[mole]

well, personally, I use Textpad to write the html and I'd prefer <br><br> to generate a line break with white space rather than <p> and </p>.
But maybe that's just me

[europeforvisitors]

well, personally, I use Textpad to write the html and I'd prefer <br><br> to generate a line break with white space rather than <p> and </p>.
But maybe that's just me.

HTML was devised as a structural markup language. With that in mind, it's easy to see why a paragraph should be identified with <p> and </p> tags--just as heads should be identified with tags such as <h1>, <h2>, and so on. Structurally, a paragraph is just that: a paragraph, not a block of text that's broken into chunks with <br> tags.

[sitebasics]

If you're going to use a wysiwyg editor to generate your html, you can expect to be at their mercy with regard to html formatting. The paragraph vs. line break issue is formatting, rather than structural -- you can always define your <P> with a style, if you don't like the way your editor does it.

Personally (and I'm going to sound quite antiquated here) I prefer Homesite 3 -- it's got everything I need to build html that works, extended search/replace, it uses standard word processing keystrokes for simple formatting, and it colors my tags. More than that, I don't need. I only code by hand -- learned my lesson with wysiwyg editors, years ago. It's just not worth the time and effort to me, cleaning up their interpretations of what constitutes decent html.

As for the word processing "standard" of Enter=<P>, I'm not familiar with that. I've been doing word processing for years, and in my experience, it's the paragraph formatting which determines the height of the break, rather than any particular keystroke.

~K~

[europeforvisitors]

As for the word processing "standard" of Enter=<P>, I'm not familiar with that. I've been doing word processing for years, and in my experience, it's the paragraph formatting which determines the height of the break, rather than any particular keystroke.

And with HTML, the height of the break is determined by the browser. So what? What matters is that, by longstanding tradition, hitting the "Enter" key creates a new paragraph when the user is entering text. It therefore makes sense that FrontPage, Dreamweaver, and similar tools should create a new paragraph when a user hits the "Enter" key--and, by definition, that means using <p> and </p> tags, not a <br> tag.

[pageoneresults]

In graphics terms...

Enter = Hard Return (<p>)
Shift + Enter = Soft Return (<br>)

It has always been like this as long as I can remember. I started on a Mac in 1991 and I've not seen any programs treat the two differently.