On a factual level: Yes, the people who maintain this board have enough brains to figure out an auto-line-break (or "insert <p> tags" feature). That's what I infer from my dealings with them. So my guess is that not having this feature is a deliberate choice, rather than dumbness. A lot of message boards resort to inventing their own tags to allow for formatting. For a site like this one that caters to programmers, I find it an excellent choice to just give them all the expressiveness they want by letting them use what they already know: HTML.

Regarding the validity of the HTML generated -- PM has grown over the years, and little bugs can be found here and there. You can help the site maintainers by giving appropriate feedback.

 

On a personal level: Looking at your post, I get the impression that you are trying to pretend that you want PM to improve, but actually you want to show that you know things better than those who are too dumb to figure out auto-line-break features. Or maybe you are retaliating against someone who told you not to parse HTML using regexes. Well, hopefully I'm wrong.

At PM, we tend to not take ourselves or Perl too serious. That helps in maintaining good relationships and actually getting work done.


In reply to Re: Perl Monks hypocrisy by crenz
in thread Perl Monks hypocrisy by Wassercrats

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.