Paragraphs are <br>s

[OscarGodson]

A paragraph should return a paragraph, not a bunch of <br>. This is terribly unsemantic and will make global CSS changes for "paragraphs" nearly impossible.

Currently:

Paragraph 1
<br>
<br>
P2
<br>
line break on P2

Should be:

<p>Paragraph 1</p>
<p>P2<br>line break on P2</p>

[tiff]

Hello Oscar,

Can you please elaborate on this?
How are you inserting paragraphs in wysihtml5? Which browser is affected?

Please be aware that wysihtml5 intentionally inserts <br> when the user hits the enter key.
This is what I think people, who are used to textareas, would expect.

Thanks.

[OscarGodson]

It's not a textarea tho. Nearly all WYSIWYG editors including the most popular tinyMCE create a hard return on enter and a soft return on shift+enter (p should be created on hard return, br on soft) hence the name WYSIWYG. A hard return means a new paragraph. Textareas don't act this way because it's supposed to be raw text. I think its more confusing to have a WYSIWYG act like a textarea and terribly hard to style after the HTML is generated with brs instead or ps

You're never taught to or see (I hope) whole articles with no p tags :)

I'm on Chrome 17

Commented on an iPhone so sorry in advance for misspellings or falty auto corrects :)

[tiff]

Hey Oscar,

sorry to disappoint you but imho creating soft line breaks when the user hits enter is best for the average internet user in terms of usability.
If a user explicitly wants to insert a paragraph then he should use the corresponding toolbar button.

However I agree with you that from a technical view it's much easier to insert a paragraph.
Feel free to fork the project and add an option parameter which toggles between paragraphs and line breaks. I'd be happy to merge that.

Thanks!

[OscarGodson]

Usability? You really think the average internet user even knows what a <br> and <p> is or the issues that will arise when you try to style it, SEO, or the semantics?

If you're going to keep the soft returns, that's fine, but for the love of god create a <p> when there are two <br>s together because that's what the user is expecting. This is how Blogger acts for example. Don't have some major blogging service add this as their editor and have hundreds of thousands of articles with not a single <p>.

Trust me, not a single user in the wild will click a button every time he wants to make a <p>. I was the lead engineer for Portland, OR's official site and we did the same thing and we ended up with over 300k pages with not a single paragraph. When we did a redesign a couple years ago it was impossible to restyle the <p> spacing since they didn't exist. It was also an ugly pile of markup soup of <br><br><br> even sometimes because they wanted to add "more spacing". I've left and they're still restyling all the pages and haven't launched the redesign and are having to reteach all the users how to use the editor.

If it's usability that's your concern, great, but remember the user expects he's making a new paragraph when he hits enter twice.

[tiff]

Thanks for your opinion and time. As already said: feel free to contribute. Just hit the "fork" button above ✌️

[andybak]

Out of interest - MS Word now defaults to a paragraph break on Enter instead of a linebreak. My users had no trouble learning the distinction.

(side-note: this behaviour being hard-coded was a deal breaker for me. The distinction between linebreaks and paragraphs is essential and I can't style user-content correctly without it)

[OscarGodson]

@andybak Yep. I moved over the City of Portland (the local government offices) without any issue as well. shift+enter took about 1 min of just sending out a notification that "hey, you press shift+enter now".

[tiff]

Please don't see wysihtml5 as a Microsoft Word for the web. It's rather a lightweight library that enhances how users interact with textarea's.
However as more and more people are requesting this feature I might consider this for wysihtml5 0.4.
Thanks for your feedback.

[micho]

For reference, Markdown considers a linebreak like this a <br>:

asdasd
asdasd

However, having a blank line makes them behave as <p>:

asdasd

asdasd

[hcarvalhoalves]

There's also the option of inserting <br/> the first time the user hits return, and a <p> for another consecutive return. I don't know how hard that would be to implement, thought, since you would have to go back and forth.

That said, a return means a paragraph break, not a new line. @OscarGodson is correct at his reasoning that the default generates bad markup.

[zacstewart]

+1 for paragraphs on return.

[pcardoso]

Like above, +1 for paragraphs on return, breaks on shift-return.