You are not forced to use br tags. In fact I'd generally strongly discourage their use. Most often people use br tags to "format" their text into "nice" line lengths. That is a pure waste of effort, flies directly in the face of the intent of HTML and really pisses off anyone who doesn't agree with your concept of a "nice" line length.

For PerlMonks there are two markup tags you need to know 'p' tags and 'c' (or 'code') tags. Almost anything else is fancy and not required. The only other "Magic" that a frequent poster on PerlMonks needs to know is how to link stuff using [ and ].

So, two tags and one style of link magic to cover 90% of posts on PerlMonks. How hard is that to learn?

Perl reduces RSI - it saves typing

In reply to Re: Wiki-Style syntax for posting by GrandFather
in thread Wiki-Style syntax for posting by Anonymous Monk

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.