The discussion below is form the original HyphenListMarkupProposal and was factored out to here:
Mystic Software breaking the line hard.#
It was stated above that that users might do hard line breaks. In the ListMarkupLinebreakArgument it was assumed that there is software that also inserts hard line breaks:
Note that the line-breaking may come from line- wrapping software, so it is not a question where you would put the dash.
If you turn on line wrap in an editor, the editor will visually wrap the line. You will find this behavior in almost all editors. Those editors however do NOT insert hard line breaks, that could be confused by parsers so that they make the errors above -- they only do it visually. So far no one has brought up examples of such an editor, or editor option, that inserts hard line breaks into text. Therefore this is considered as an irrelevant argument unless someone provides an example of an editor that is relevant in practice.
Gregor: This is getting polemic. The mystic software might be a simple Internet Explorer, see http://de.selfhtml.org/html/formulare/eingabe.htm#bereiche_umbruch
. Of course this is under control of Wiki software, so it could be changed. More relevant is my experience in TWiki discussion (TWiki does not insert hard breaks), where a lot of participants responded by hard-wrapped paragraphs. I don't know whether there is a browser setting overriding, or whether they simply copy-pasted into their editor forth and back. The only editor I use is my email program, which supports reformatting text to a given width.
Christoph: Polemic in a sense that I wanted to cause a reaction, since nobody so far has brought up concrete examples. And indeed it did: Yves brought up the text editors BBEdit and TextWrangler, which have it as an option. But since it is optional and they are not that common I wouldn't count it relevant to practice (to a larger amount of end users). But it also got me thinking myself - putting up polemic stuff in pages also put me under pressure ;-) -- and indeed I found one example that I so far overlooked. It has real consequences to practice. People who have to work with this program know it when they paste in long URL's in mails and wonder why it does not work anymore after they send it: Outlook hard breaks the line by default. This is serious - so hard line breaking software isn't mystical at all - the werewolf exists, and I was wrong.