ayg wrote:

This is currently intended behavior, not a bug. Links are HTML <a> elements,
and so can contain HTML line breaks (<br>s), but not <p>s. MediaWiki generally
ignores a lone line break, and converts any two consecutive line breaks into a
<p>. Having a lone line break in an external link's display text would
therefore do nothing, and having more would create illegal <p>s. The same
applies to internal links.

Of course, the rules could always be changed for links if desired, making any
line break into an HTML <br> and suppressing normal linebreak rendering (the
same could be done for literal <h#> and <p> tags). Is that what you want? It
seems unlikely to break anything.

ligulem wrote:

(In reply to comment #1)

This is currently intended behavior, not a bug. Links are HTML <a> elements,
and so can contain HTML line breaks (<br>s), but not <p>s. ...

As I understand it, the request by Jed is not to produce a line break in the
html output. He wants the parser to ignore the line break found in the wiki
source in this case. This would allow for more editorial freeness on the level
of the wiki source and maybe help editors making less buggy wiki pages, because
it is a difficult to track down error (an error in the wiki-source for the
respective page). Whitespace is ignored by the parser in other circumstances
too, so it might well be perceieved as odd by editors to have a line break as a
semantic effect, which it is at the moment.

ayg wrote:

In general, fewer linebreaks should be ignored, IMO, not more. Ignoring
linebreaks is confusing.

ligulem wrote:

(In reply to comment #3)
The parser already ignores linebreaks for example inside template call {{..}}.
Example for a valid template call:

{{

cite web
  | title = No nonsence
  | url = http://example.com
  | accessdate = 2006-08-22

}}

Ignoring whitespace is also done for ParserFunctions ("#if:" & Co). Where it is
helpful for readable wiki-code.

So, for people accustomed to that, significant newlines inside [[ ]] -- which is
only significant in so far as it leads to stupid output -- is more confusing.

clear wrote:

Comment #1 is confusing, perhaps I didn't explain clearly. We are talking about
a single line break, although that shouldn't be relevant as the line break isn't
in the URL, but rather in the text.

<pre>
The problem is the output of

[http://www.example.com link to
example dot com]

is not

<a HREF="http://www.example.com">link to
example dot com</a>

but rather it comes out

[<a href="http://www.example.com">http://www.example.com</a>link to example dot com]

Note the square braces and URL are still visible to the reader, which they
should not be when text is supplied after a URL in single brace wiki text.

Compare this cite web to comment #4 for another example
{{
cite web

nonsence

}}
</pre>

Wiki markup is line-based, and [url text] is not a multiline construct, but an inline one.

ligulem wrote:

Inefficient workarounds for some cases are
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Link,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Wikilink, which do make the parser happy
by feeding everything on the same line.