Saturday, March 19, 2011

Blogger's text editor: I make another plea for a rational approach to paragraph formatting

It took considerable restraint for me to write this so politely.

Please stop using div tags to define paragraphs - Blogger Help

My blogs start around 2002, when Blogger used carriage returns to delimit paragraphs. They extend through the time that Blogger used <br> tags with or without hidden carriage returns.

These days, with either the "new" or legacy editor, it's unclear to me what Blogger does. I only know that when I use MarsEdit, Ecto or the native editor I see pairs of div tags. This causes a mess. Depending on which editor I use paragraphs vanish or spacing doubles. If I open older posts with the editors I get no paragraph spacing.

If I go into preferences I see:

"If Yes is selected, single hard-returns entered in the Post Editor will be replaced with single <br /> tags in your blog, and two hard-returns will be replaced with two tags (<br /><br />))."

Of course br tags are no longer used, so this language is simply wrong. If set it to "No" my old posts format incorrectly. To put it mildly, this is a mess.

I would like Blogger to use tags to, you know, delimit paragraphs. I would like Blogger to convert older posts to use <p> tags. Please Blogger, stop using <div> and <br> to define paragraphs, it's not what they're made for.

It's hopeless (yes, I've tried changing templates). Alas, I don't think there's really any way to move my blogs and keep any sort of reasonable formatting across 5,300 or so posts.

See also:

1 comment:

Monica said...

I was so frustrated just now when I was posting a new article in my only blog left in blogger as I see there are few enhancement on and off.

Yet Blogger text editor is the most obsolete editor left in the blogging platforms.

Publishing through Windows Live Writer is the best way so far.

p.s. I wonder why blogger never support h1, h2, h3 tag while Google keeps emphasize in their webmaster blog about how important those tags are...