Line breaks on the web – absolutely not!

There are a lot of things you can see on the web that are really unnecessary and that really mess up the layout, design and readability. One of them is line breaks.

There is simply no reason to ever make a line break in text on the web. Line breaks are something that used to be necessary when you used a typewriter, but are done automatically by your browser.

Paragraph breaks are another matter

I sometimes get the impression that many people don’t know or understand the difference between line breaks and paragraph breaks and that this is what leads to doing things the wrong way. This week I have gone through a website, made by another web agency where this is an error that is found over and over again. It is sad and inexcusable when it is a professional agency that has made the page.

What is a paragraph break?

In Swedish, we have two ways to choose from to mark a new paragraph. The most common on the web is an extra blank row/space before the next line. The second way is to make an indent in the first line of the new paragraph.

Why you should not make line breaks

Here you see the same text but in two different screen resolutions. As you can see, the line breaks have been automatically changed by the browser and the text flows.

Now let’s imagine that I had made line breaks instead of letting the text flow freely. It would have looked like this:

It gets weird when line breaks come out of the blue.

The easiest way to remember this is to learn that the enter key is not a line break but a paragraph break!