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