There is some truth in your statement. But: for editing purposes jumping line length don't hurt that much
Switching line lengths require more effort on the part of the human brain and lead to semantic interpretations of the breaks (as emphasis, pause etc.).
Compare:
Messages from Communities Around the Globe Palestinians and international friends from the United States, the UK, and the Netherlands marched along Sea Street, Sharia al Baha, one of the central streets in Rafah Camp. As they approached the center of town they began to shout through bullhorns in Arabic "Hurriyah la Falesteen! Hurriyah la al Iraq! Hurriyah la Rafah! Hurriyah la Baghdad!" and in English "Freedom for Palestine! Freedom for Iraq! Freedom for Rafah! Freedom for Baghdad!"
vs.
Messages from Communities Around the Globe Palestinians and international friends from the United States, the UK, and the Netherlands marched along Sea Street, Sharia al Baha, one of the central streets in Rafah Camp. As they approached the center of town they began to shout through bullhorns in Arabic "Hurriyah la Falesteen! Hurriyah la al Iraq! Hurriyah la Rafah! Hurriyah la Baghdad!" and in English "Freedom for Palestine! Freedom for Iraq! Freedom for Rafah! Freedom for Baghdad!"
Since you have to read to edit, this is a very serious problem.
(Emacs hat M-q to work around those problems...)
Yes, but people with different line lengths have to keep doing this to fix each other's annoying breaks. Furthermore, most people do use the browser- internal editor, like it or not, for convenience reasons alone. I do so myself a lot because Mozilla has no external editor support and cannot paste more than 4000 bytes from most other applications on Linux.
For these reasons, I will probably revert any edits I see which needlessly insert linebreaks into text.
and more important I simply depend on broken lines -- grep, sed and awk work best on those line.
I do not see the advantage here -- in fact, you will have to go to extra trouble when doing a regex on a paragraph with linebreaks in it, since you usually care about the paragraph, not about the line. Semantically, however, the linebreaks are a bug that has a long history in the Unix world.
BTW, if you used vim, you could just do ":set lbr" to turn on soft wrapping...
Regards,
Erik