Wednesday, April 15, 2009

A Tip for Commenters

Something seems to have changed in Blogger, and if you comment here you may want to do it a little differently. As far as I can tell, when there is an HTML tag at the end of a line, for instance if your paragraph ends with a link like this: <a href="http://www.link.com">Link</a>, or if you <i>italicize</i> something at the end of a sentence, and then press Enter twice to start a new paragraph, Blogger doesn't insert an empty line. Instead it starts the new paragraph right after your ending tag and things run together. It looks fine in the preview, but once you publish your comment it looks wrong.

The cure for this is not too hard, you will have to write some HTML yourself. After your tag, at the end of a line, type <br> to go to the next line. Put two of them -- <br> <br> -- to start a new paragraph, that is, to insert an empty line. <br> stands for "Break," e.g., a line break. Normally Blogger is smart enough to insert this code for you when it sees two carriage returns, somehow they have broken that feature.

In the preview, you might see too much space between paragraphs. Don't worry, it will look okay when it gets published on the Internet.

I don't know what has changed, and I expect that at some point the Blogger people will realized they have a bug and fix this. In the meantime, this will make your comments a little easier to read.

4 Comments:

Blogger Zoe Brain said...

Technically <br/> but the lack of a / is tolerated by most browsers.

April 16, 2009 1:45 AM  
Blogger JimK said...

Thanks, Zoe, the old HTML works and seemed easier than the "more correct" XHTML tag. Tell me, what do you use to make bold letters?

JimK

April 16, 2009 6:40 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

I've had some problems with this too.

New paragraph: Blah, blah blah.

April 26, 2009 2:43 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Yay, it worked!

April 26, 2009 2:44 AM  

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