> Without any line breaks at all, this paragraph appears in source as a long, continuous line of text
Of course it doesn't because
> (which may be automatically wrapped at a fixed column length, depending on your editor settings):
Indeed, are you short on apps that support this ancient text formatting feature?
> Adding a line break after each sentence makes it easier to understand the shape and structure of the source text
Nope again, visually you've just wasted my devices width or overestimated my smartphone's width and I get exactly the same issue you've just complained about: a single sentence that doesn't fit.
Semantically, what you're looking for already exists and is called a paragraph. A sentence has a different meaning, which you break by line breaking after every single one. It kills the structure, not "makes it easier to understand the shape and structure of the source text"
(also, bullet points exist)
PS
By the way, why deprive readers of extra clarity offered by this formatting?
> We can further clarify the source text by adding a line break after the clause “with reason and conscience”. This helps to distinguish between the “and” used as a coordinating conjunction between “reason and conscience” and the “and” used as a subordinating conjunction with the clause
dkh 8 hours ago [-]
I think you might be misunderstanding. The semantic line breaks described here are not shown to readers. They are visible only to the person writing/editing the text, as a tool for their own use. If you aren't someone who finds a tool like this useful for your own writing, then no worries! Nobody has been harmed by this existing but not being used. It has no effect on the result.
While I never knew there was a name for this, I naturally do something very similar when writing, keeping thoughts separated by at least a line or two, even if I imagine they'll be in the same paragraph in the end result, just so I have a visual sense of where my different thoughts are and how long they are.
pests 3 hours ago [-]
I’ve always done similar. My initial writing is a disconnected jumble of sentence parts, sentences, more fleshed out paragraphs, etc just to get ideas out and they later get organized into something cohesive.
eviks 8 hours ago [-]
> are not shown to readers.
Sure they are, though the spec hides some readers behind other names like "editors, and other collaborators"
But also, have you never read the plain text / source of some markdown/other markup language written by someone else? Readme.md in its raw form?
And the spec explicitly applies to plain text, so it's self-contradictory as "the final rendered output" of plain text is... itself.
tolerance 5 hours ago [-]
I like your extension of the term “readers” but I don’t think that’s the intended use for this matter. And if it were, would it be safe to assume that editors and other collaborators would consent to this standard?
> But also, have you never read the plain text / source of some markdown/other markup language written by someone else? Readme.md in its raw form?
That’s beside the point because the spec states "A semantic line break must not alter the final rendered output of the document.”
And I think you’re misinterpreting what “plain text” refers to here. Not .txt files exclusively, but the markup languages mentioned as well that are...plain text. The final rendered output of these kind of documents are not themselves.
The expectation is that the source of whatever flavor of plain text is not the final output.
If this practice offends you, don’t use it. This is a specification suggesting a practice for you* to use.
How have you been able to manage with hard-wrapped text elsewhere?
eviks 4 hours ago [-]
> And if it were, would it be safe to assume that editors and other collaborators would consent to this standard?
Easy no, only some of them in some instances. There is no uniformity at such a scale / variety of collaboration.
> That’s beside the point because the spec states
It's not, and I've addressed this in the very next semantic line! And you've also ignored the very point in your quoted line as well. Editing "Readme.md in its raw form" with the extra line breaks is still bad regardless of the final rendered output.
> Not .txt files exclusively
I don't need exclusivity, complementarity still works. And again, final output doesn't save you
> If this practice offends you, don’t use it.
If the criticism offends you, practice in the shadows and don't publish the raw misformatted specs/docs!
> How have you been able to manage with hard-wrapped text elsewhere?
Sometimes by batch-replacing those extra newlines in a text editor, sometiems by abandoning reading because the text reflow is too broken, sometimes just by plowing through while cursing the cavemen that force their habits onto the readers with different devices.
tolerance 4 hours ago [-]
Your aversion appears
to be psychological.
It seems to me like
you have trouble examining
things by the sum of
their parts and
semantic line breaks
agitate this.
You’re free to
the render “misformatted”
text in the format that it’s
intended to be viewed.
And I take it that
physical literature
is a burden for you
to bear.
My condolences.
lelandbatey 2 hours ago [-]
I think this proposal is aimed at folks who won't do things like view plain-text documents on a smartphone, which I think is a reasonable assumption/tradeoff. I think bringing up viewing plaintext on your phone is... a misplaced optimization.
Regardless, if your point is that actually interacting with such a document would be annoying, I agree. I think anything that's giving me jagged paragraphs instead of nicely wrapped text would drive me crazy (though I'm a lover of hard wrapped plaintext). I know one day I'll end up "tidying the formatting" of a markdown doc formatted in this way and end up getting linked to this proposal.
eviks 2 hours ago [-]
> proposal is aimed at folks who won't do
What's the mechanism that will exclude all the writers/editors/collaborators/readers who are not part of the aimed at group? Which reason helps here?
gorgoiler 11 hours ago [-]
Prior art on writing line oriented prose comes from one B. Kernighan, no less! Via this blog post:
> Start each sentence on a new line. Make lines short, and break lines at natural places, such as after commas and semicolons, rather than randomly. Since most people change documents by rewriting phrases and adding, deleting and rearranging sentences, these precautions simplify any editing you have to do later.
> A semantic line break SHOULD occur after an […] em dash (—).
I agree with this, however it means that no existing markup language supports semantic line breaks, because every last one of them just turns the break into a space—and em dashes are, in most locales, not to be surrounded by a space. Consequently, you’ll end up with a stray space if you do this.
My irritation at being unable to break after an em dash (which I want to do quite frequently) was one of the things that headed me down the path of designing my own lightweight markup language (LML), to fix this and other problems I observe with existing LMLs. I’ve been using it for all my personal writing for something like four years now (though a a fair bit has changed since then), and I expect to finally have a functioning parser before the end of this year.
One of the other fun complications of this kind of line break in source code is languages that don’t have a word divider—inserting a space at all is incorrect in them.
> any remaining segment break is either transformed into a space (U+0020) or removed depending on the context before and after the break. The rules for this operation are UA-defined in this level.
My LML currently turns segment breaks into a space unless the line ends with an en or em dash, unless there’s a colon or a space before that. I haven’t got anything in place for languages with no word separator yet, but it is unusually well-suited to such languages.
vthriller 9 hours ago [-]
> em dashes are, in most locales, not to be surrounded by a space
This is definitely not the case for at least French and Russian, which means markup renderers now have to guess text language or force authors to declare such in some metadata header. And it gets even more complicated with inclusion of block quotes in different languages.
chrismorgan 8 hours ago [-]
It’s not hard and doesn’t need language awareness; I described how to detect it: if there’s no space before an end-of-line em dash, suppress the segment-break-replacing space.
layer8 4 hours ago [-]
Unicode has U+200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE for that purpose. In HTML and hence Markdown you can also use `<wbr>`. If you’re using a custom setup anyway, you can have it be inserted automatically by regex replacement, as a pre-rendering step.
chrismorgan 2 hours ago [-]
I think you’ve misunderstood something? This is about suppressing the turning of a segment break into a space, not about line break opportunities.
> Unicode has U+200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE for that purpose.
ZWSP is not at all “for that purpose”. If you mean this:
A—​
B
Well, I am mildly surprised to find that no extra space is added in Gecko or Blink. But in WebKit, a space is still added; for this is part of the “UA-defined” bit I quoted.
And if you’re willing to do preprocessing, you can just merge the lines, that’d actually work.
> In HTML and hence Markdown you can also use `<wbr>`.
I fail to see how <wbr> is relevant.
layer8 1 hours ago [-]
Indeed, I skimmed a bit and misread “unable to break” to mean that you wanted a line-break opportunity but the renderer didn’t allow for it when a letter is directly following an em dash. But it’s the other way around, you want a line break in the source after an em dash to not translate into a space in the rendering. This would likewise be possible to handle by regex replacement as a pre-rendering step.
More generally, I see markup languages and the details of how they are rendered as largely orthogonal. You don’t necessarily need to invent a different markup language in order to adjust the rendering.
photon_garden 9 hours ago [-]
More folks should define their own lightweight markup languages! It’s fun and makes your writing and notes feel more like your own.
I created a convention for defining sub-notes (with frontmatter) in a Markdown note and have found it really helpful over the past few years.
layer8 6 hours ago [-]
The main reason I use semantic line breaks, not explicitly mentioned in this article, is that it minimizes reformatting when editing. Only the subclause being edited is reformatted, while the rest of the paragraph remains as-is. This also minimizes the changes in line-oriented diffs.
While one could rely on automated line-wrapping instead of using hard line breaks that require reformatting, it isn’t usefully available in all environments, in particular for indented paragraphs and when having elements like ASCII art or code that shouldn’t be word-wrapped, and it makes plain-text diffs larger than necessary when whole paragraphs are on a single source line.
anentropic 7 hours ago [-]
I don't get it.
TBH most of the time I find markdown's collapsing of whitespace annoying - if you want a 'visual' line-break you have to add unnatural double space at the end of preceding line. And even this is renderer dependent, I don't think is part of the spec (?) so some renderers don't respect it (and IIRC GitHub comments renderer does't need it, i.e. doesn't do semantic line breaks)
Another pet hate is text editors which auto-convert double space into ". " - I find this even cropping up in IDEs now, so you try to add an end of line comment "...] # here" and it turns into "...]. # here". Awful
chrismorgan 7 hours ago [-]
> if you want a 'visual' line-break you have to add unnatural double space at the end of preceding line.
That’s just a bad syntax choice on Gruber’s part. CommonMark adds trailing backslash as an alternative, so that will work in most places these days.
> And even this is renderer dependent, I don't think is part of the spec (?)
Yes, GitHub decided on a wilful violation of Markdown for issues and discussions.
> text editors which auto-convert double space into ". "
I have seen that as a feature on Android keyboards, but I would be very much surprised to find it in non-keyboard software.
antiframe 3 hours ago [-]
> That’s just a bad syntax choice on Gruber’s part.
I believe Gruber was inspired by how people wrote emphasis in plain text emails and other text documents. Most MUA at the time would treat trailing whitespace as a hard rather than soft line break. This is from my--now aging--memory, and I can't find a source to corroborate. I do recall, though, there were clients that didn't do it well (ahem, Outlook), and would break plain text formatting of deeply-nested quoted text. (Don't even get me started on how Outlook single-handedly changed culture from bottom posting to top posting).
chrismorgan 2 hours ago [-]
> (Don't even get me started on how Outlook single-handedly changed culture from bottom posting to top posting).
Or how it single-handedly kept HTML for email frozen with an incomplete and buggy implementation of HTML 3.2 from 1997…
jsdalton 6 hours ago [-]
I’ve often thought this would be useful for version control and change review, since it allows diffs to be a lot less noisy. I’m imagining how much easier it would be to review a PR with significant README edits if the file was already structured with semantic line breaks.
I’ve previously had the above thought and applied it to the end of sentences, but the idea of introducing them at the level of semantic thought had not occurred to me. But if this is where we’re going I’d start to wish for indentation possibilities. I’ve do this frequently with SQL statements, introducing both line breaks and indentations to provide a visual structure that mimics the semantic structure of clauses and the details they contain.
meatmanek 4 hours ago [-]
Indeed. Edits show up as a -/+ on just the sentence or clause that has changed. Contrast with hard-wrapped text, where a single word change towards the beginning of a paragraph can cause the entire paragraph to be replaced in the diff view, as things reflow.
tpoacher 8 hours ago [-]
There is a very good technical argument for NOT using "semantic" line breaks when editing markup source code, especially of the "hardwrap" variety, and that is the ability to easily diff two versions of the same document, e.g. when comparing latex git commits.
Anything that reorganises the sentence around for the sake of maintaining justification, completely destroys any meaningful diff from taking place.
And ideally your editor should support both hard and soft wrapping, so that aesthetics of wrapping shouldn't be a big issue.
And I say this as a fan of hardwrapping text.
chrismorgan 8 hours ago [-]
I think you’ve got things back to front. Semantic line breaks improves diffing.
admko 6 hours ago [-]
I made a command-line tool [0] powered by Transformer models that performs semantic linebreaks to breaks lines in a text file at semantic boundaries. It supports multiple file types including LaTeX, Markdown, and plain text, with automatic file type detection.
I also wonder, why conceal bits of information from readers, while they could possibly benefit of them the same way editors and writers do. Admittedly, the outcome then seem like a poetry, but … why not?
To give it a shot on that page, simple way to see these breaks it to run
document.body.insertAdjacentHTML
( 'afterend'
,`<style>p, li { white-space: pre-line; }</style>`
)
in devtools console. (Using `pre-wrap` instead of `pre-line` is also interesting: indents "wrapped" lines by the source code indent, what gives it even more clarity.
(By the way, HN comments
also
preserve
line
breaks
in
the
source output, but unless revealed by some extra style, they are usually not presented on the surface.)
ivan_ah 6 hours ago [-]
The article mentions the git diffing command `git diff --word-diff`, which is cool, but I find an even better version to be:
git diff --color-words
which shows words removed in red, and words added in blue. The output produced is similar to `latexdiff` in case you're familiar.
geocar 3 hours ago [-]
Hi buddy you might be colorblind: git diff uses green for added things, not blue. That includes --color-words.
You might've also changed your color theme and forgotten. You can pipe through less (or something else that doesn't understand the control code) and look for ^[[31m is red; ^[[32m is green; ^[[34m would be blue (although ^[[36m is kindof a light blue/cyan) to tell if you've reconfigured your terminal, or you've reconfigured git's default colors, but if you haven't done either you might want to get your color-vision checked!
ivan_ah 2 hours ago [-]
Oh yes, I found this in my `~/.gitconfig`:
[color "diff"]
plain = normal
meta = bold
frag = cyan
old = red
new = blue
I guess I changed to match the red-blue color convention I'm used to from latexdiff.
account42 10 hours ago [-]
The problem is that this makes having line breaks that are not paragraph breaks in the output much more awkward and I think those are much more important than line breaks that are only there in the source.
This is especially true for Markdown which is supposed to be a pretty rendering of conventions that were already common in text only communication so it's weird when explicitly entered line breaks are ignored in the output.
chrismorgan 10 hours ago [-]
The significant majority of markup languages essentially treat a single line breaks as a space. HTML, Markdown, et cetera. In lightweight markup languages, you normally need a blank line (i.e. two line breaks) to signify a paragraph break.
GitHub issues and discussions are an outlier in treating them as hard single line breaks (which are not paragraph breaks).
Most plain-text communication used to use line wrapping, often not supporting lines above, say, 100 characters.
Just like typeset prose uses wrapping, because your paper isn’t infinitely wide.
3036e4 7 hours ago [-]
Good thing about Markdown is that the lack of a proper spec means you can pick one you like (when possible). Pandoc for instance treats input Markdown line-breaks in a sane way, allowing semantic breaks to not affect the output.
Thorrez 4 hours ago [-]
If your editor auto reflows the text, that will conflict with this, by erasing line breaks you inserted.
This is imposing an 80-character line length limit. With a line length limit, I want an editor to reflow my text so I don't have to do the line length limit manually.
layer8 4 hours ago [-]
Many editors allow reformatting a user-selected portion or the current line, and some even the current sentence, with a simple keyboard shortcut.
riffraff 7 hours ago [-]
this seems to consider "text being read after formatting" and "text being read before formatting" as different things.
Which I guess, if you're the sole author of the text might be true.
But in my experience most text that gets rendered is also read and edited by multiple people in its source form, so why wouldn't you want to make source just as easy to read?
simonbw 1 hours ago [-]
I think it's about optimizing for different types of reading. When you're reading the final text, you're reading to absorb the content. When you're reading the source text, you're reading to find edits you want to make. Using more line breaks is a way of making the document easier to scan if you're familiar with the "shape" of it.
pabs3 7 hours ago [-]
Wonder if any linters know about this convention.
dorianmariecom 10 hours ago [-]
i thought this was for ruby and javascript and this would be really cool.
automated formatting including newlines, would be great.
Of course it doesn't because
> (which may be automatically wrapped at a fixed column length, depending on your editor settings):
Indeed, are you short on apps that support this ancient text formatting feature?
> Adding a line break after each sentence makes it easier to understand the shape and structure of the source text
Nope again, visually you've just wasted my devices width or overestimated my smartphone's width and I get exactly the same issue you've just complained about: a single sentence that doesn't fit.
Semantically, what you're looking for already exists and is called a paragraph. A sentence has a different meaning, which you break by line breaking after every single one. It kills the structure, not "makes it easier to understand the shape and structure of the source text" (also, bullet points exist)
PS By the way, why deprive readers of extra clarity offered by this formatting?
> We can further clarify the source text by adding a line break after the clause “with reason and conscience”. This helps to distinguish between the “and” used as a coordinating conjunction between “reason and conscience” and the “and” used as a subordinating conjunction with the clause
While I never knew there was a name for this, I naturally do something very similar when writing, keeping thoughts separated by at least a line or two, even if I imagine they'll be in the same paragraph in the end result, just so I have a visual sense of where my different thoughts are and how long they are.
Sure they are, though the spec hides some readers behind other names like "editors, and other collaborators"
But also, have you never read the plain text / source of some markdown/other markup language written by someone else? Readme.md in its raw form?
And the spec explicitly applies to plain text, so it's self-contradictory as "the final rendered output" of plain text is... itself.
> But also, have you never read the plain text / source of some markdown/other markup language written by someone else? Readme.md in its raw form?
That’s beside the point because the spec states "A semantic line break must not alter the final rendered output of the document.”
And I think you’re misinterpreting what “plain text” refers to here. Not .txt files exclusively, but the markup languages mentioned as well that are...plain text. The final rendered output of these kind of documents are not themselves.
The expectation is that the source of whatever flavor of plain text is not the final output.
If this practice offends you, don’t use it. This is a specification suggesting a practice for you* to use.
How have you been able to manage with hard-wrapped text elsewhere?
Easy no, only some of them in some instances. There is no uniformity at such a scale / variety of collaboration.
> That’s beside the point because the spec states
It's not, and I've addressed this in the very next semantic line! And you've also ignored the very point in your quoted line as well. Editing "Readme.md in its raw form" with the extra line breaks is still bad regardless of the final rendered output.
> Not .txt files exclusively
I don't need exclusivity, complementarity still works. And again, final output doesn't save you
> If this practice offends you, don’t use it.
If the criticism offends you, practice in the shadows and don't publish the raw misformatted specs/docs!
> How have you been able to manage with hard-wrapped text elsewhere?
Sometimes by batch-replacing those extra newlines in a text editor, sometiems by abandoning reading because the text reflow is too broken, sometimes just by plowing through while cursing the cavemen that force their habits onto the readers with different devices.
Regardless, if your point is that actually interacting with such a document would be annoying, I agree. I think anything that's giving me jagged paragraphs instead of nicely wrapped text would drive me crazy (though I'm a lover of hard wrapped plaintext). I know one day I'll end up "tidying the formatting" of a markdown doc formatted in this way and end up getting linked to this proposal.
What's the mechanism that will exclude all the writers/editors/collaborators/readers who are not part of the aimed at group? Which reason helps here?
https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2012/one-sentence-per-line/
> Start each sentence on a new line. Make lines short, and break lines at natural places, such as after commas and semicolons, rather than randomly. Since most people change documents by rewriting phrases and adding, deleting and rearranging sentences, these precautions simplify any editing you have to do later.
— Brian Kernighan, 1974
See e.g. https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/doc/cacm/p...
I agree with this, however it means that no existing markup language supports semantic line breaks, because every last one of them just turns the break into a space—and em dashes are, in most locales, not to be surrounded by a space. Consequently, you’ll end up with a stray space if you do this.
My irritation at being unable to break after an em dash (which I want to do quite frequently) was one of the things that headed me down the path of designing my own lightweight markup language (LML), to fix this and other problems I observe with existing LMLs. I’ve been using it for all my personal writing for something like four years now (though a a fair bit has changed since then), and I expect to finally have a functioning parser before the end of this year.
One of the other fun complications of this kind of line break in source code is languages that don’t have a word divider—inserting a space at all is incorrect in them.
CSS presently just leaves such decisions UA-defined <https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-4/#line-break-transform>:
> any remaining segment break is either transformed into a space (U+0020) or removed depending on the context before and after the break. The rules for this operation are UA-defined in this level.
My LML currently turns segment breaks into a space unless the line ends with an en or em dash, unless there’s a colon or a space before that. I haven’t got anything in place for languages with no word separator yet, but it is unusually well-suited to such languages.
This is definitely not the case for at least French and Russian, which means markup renderers now have to guess text language or force authors to declare such in some metadata header. And it gets even more complicated with inclusion of block quotes in different languages.
> Unicode has U+200B ZERO WIDTH SPACE for that purpose.
ZWSP is not at all “for that purpose”. If you mean this:
Well, I am mildly surprised to find that no extra space is added in Gecko or Blink. But in WebKit, a space is still added; for this is part of the “UA-defined” bit I quoted.And if you’re willing to do preprocessing, you can just merge the lines, that’d actually work.
> In HTML and hence Markdown you can also use `<wbr>`.
I fail to see how <wbr> is relevant.
More generally, I see markup languages and the details of how they are rendered as largely orthogonal. You don’t necessarily need to invent a different markup language in order to adjust the rendering.
I created a convention for defining sub-notes (with frontmatter) in a Markdown note and have found it really helpful over the past few years.
While one could rely on automated line-wrapping instead of using hard line breaks that require reformatting, it isn’t usefully available in all environments, in particular for indented paragraphs and when having elements like ASCII art or code that shouldn’t be word-wrapped, and it makes plain-text diffs larger than necessary when whole paragraphs are on a single source line.
TBH most of the time I find markdown's collapsing of whitespace annoying - if you want a 'visual' line-break you have to add unnatural double space at the end of preceding line. And even this is renderer dependent, I don't think is part of the spec (?) so some renderers don't respect it (and IIRC GitHub comments renderer does't need it, i.e. doesn't do semantic line breaks)
Another pet hate is text editors which auto-convert double space into ". " - I find this even cropping up in IDEs now, so you try to add an end of line comment "...] # here" and it turns into "...]. # here". Awful
That’s just a bad syntax choice on Gruber’s part. CommonMark adds trailing backslash as an alternative, so that will work in most places these days.
> And even this is renderer dependent, I don't think is part of the spec (?)
Yes it is. Quoting https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax: “When you do want to insert a <br /> break tag using Markdown, you end a line with two or more spaces, then type return.”
> IIRC GitHub comments renderer does't need it
Yes, GitHub decided on a wilful violation of Markdown for issues and discussions.
> text editors which auto-convert double space into ". "
I have seen that as a feature on Android keyboards, but I would be very much surprised to find it in non-keyboard software.
I believe Gruber was inspired by how people wrote emphasis in plain text emails and other text documents. Most MUA at the time would treat trailing whitespace as a hard rather than soft line break. This is from my--now aging--memory, and I can't find a source to corroborate. I do recall, though, there were clients that didn't do it well (ahem, Outlook), and would break plain text formatting of deeply-nested quoted text. (Don't even get me started on how Outlook single-handedly changed culture from bottom posting to top posting).
Or how it single-handedly kept HTML for email frozen with an incomplete and buggy implementation of HTML 3.2 from 1997…
I’ve previously had the above thought and applied it to the end of sentences, but the idea of introducing them at the level of semantic thought had not occurred to me. But if this is where we’re going I’d start to wish for indentation possibilities. I’ve do this frequently with SQL statements, introducing both line breaks and indentations to provide a visual structure that mimics the semantic structure of clauses and the details they contain.
Anything that reorganises the sentence around for the sake of maintaining justification, completely destroys any meaningful diff from taking place.
And ideally your editor should support both hard and soft wrapping, so that aesthetics of wrapping shouldn't be a big issue.
And I say this as a fan of hardwrapping text.
[0]: https://github.com/admk/sembr
I also wonder, why conceal bits of information from readers, while they could possibly benefit of them the same way editors and writers do. Admittedly, the outcome then seem like a poetry, but … why not?
To give it a shot on that page, simple way to see these breaks it to run
in devtools console. (Using `pre-wrap` instead of `pre-line` is also interesting: indents "wrapped" lines by the source code indent, what gives it even more clarity.(By the way, HN comments also preserve line breaks in the source output, but unless revealed by some extra style, they are usually not presented on the surface.)
You might've also changed your color theme and forgotten. You can pipe through less (or something else that doesn't understand the control code) and look for ^[[31m is red; ^[[32m is green; ^[[34m would be blue (although ^[[36m is kindof a light blue/cyan) to tell if you've reconfigured your terminal, or you've reconfigured git's default colors, but if you haven't done either you might want to get your color-vision checked!
This is especially true for Markdown which is supposed to be a pretty rendering of conventions that were already common in text only communication so it's weird when explicitly entered line breaks are ignored in the output.
GitHub issues and discussions are an outlier in treating them as hard single line breaks (which are not paragraph breaks).
Most plain-text communication used to use line wrapping, often not supporting lines above, say, 100 characters.
Just like typeset prose uses wrapping, because your paper isn’t infinitely wide.
This is imposing an 80-character line length limit. With a line length limit, I want an editor to reflow my text so I don't have to do the line length limit manually.
Which I guess, if you're the sole author of the text might be true.
But in my experience most text that gets rendered is also read and edited by multiple people in its source form, so why wouldn't you want to make source just as easy to read?
automated formatting including newlines, would be great.