Author: furrykef
Description:
If I recall correctly, the MediaWiki software used to ignore multiple
consecutive blank lines. I think this behavior should be restored, because I
don't think I have ever seen an instance where this has actually improved the
appearance of a page. I have, however, seen thousands of instances where it just
makes pages ugly and inconsistently spaced. For example, it seems to be typical
to put two blank lines before the first section on a page, resulting in
unnecessary extra whitespace before the TOC. But other pages that are otherwise
formatted exactly the same don't have this extra whitespace. This inconsistency
is annoying, frequent, unprofessional, and unnecessary. But that inconsistency
will always be there as long as this feature persists, with arguably very little
benefit in return.
Fixing these instances of unnecessary whitespace all the time is getting
tiresome (minor formatting issues like these make the majority of my edits on
Wikipedia), and I've been wanting to do something about it for months. If the
user really, really wants to introduce multiple consecutive blank lines, there's
always the BR tag. If the user doesn't know what the BR tag is, chances are they
shouldn't want to introduce extra whitespace in this fashion anyway. I think
that making wikis look pretty and consistent in appearance is more important
than the seemingly intuitive behavior that multiple blank lines create more
whitespace.
(Don't confuse the behavior I dispute with the behavior of one blank line
introducing a new paragraph. That behavior is obviously desirable, and it is
perfectly fine. The issue I have is when there is MORE than one blank line; this
should be treated equivalently to a single blank line. Likewise, a blank line,
an HTML comment, and another blank line should still be rendered as though if it
were a single blank line, which would remove a common source of this problem.)
If for whatever reason forcing this change on everybody is undesirable --
although frankly I can see almost no reason why this behavior could be
considered desirable to begin with -- then perhaps it can be made a page
rendering option in the user preferences.
Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement