para.txt

<h3 id="p">Paragraphs and Line Breaks</h3>

<p>A paragraph is simply one or more consecutive lines of text, separated
by one or more blank lines. (A blank line is any line that looks like a
blank line — a line containing nothing but spaces or tabs is considered
blank.) Normal paragraphs should not be indented with spaces or tabs.</p>

<p>The implication of the “one or more consecutive lines of text” rule is
that Markdown supports “hard-wrapped” text paragraphs. This differs
significantly from most other text-to-HTML formatters (including Movable
Type’s “Convert Line Breaks” option) which translate every line break
character in a paragraph into a <code>&lt;br /&gt;</code> tag.</p>

<p>When you <em>do</em> want to insert a <code>&lt;br /&gt;</code> break tag using Markdown, you
end a line with two or more spaces, then type return.</p>

<p>Yes, this takes a tad more effort to create a <code>&lt;br /&gt;</code>, but a simplistic
“every line break is a <code>&lt;br /&gt;</code>” rule wouldn’t work for Markdown.
Markdown’s email-style <a href="#blockquote">blockquoting</a> and multi-paragraph <a href="#list">list items</a>
work best — and look better — when you format them with hard breaks.</p>