When composing text for presentation, many people tend to treat white space (i.e. blank lines between paragraphs), as if it were a thing to be avoided at all costs.
Perhaps this is the result of thinking in terms of limited space (a bad habit presumably learned from school assignments of the type: "...no longer than three pages of text"). To combat white space, they rely on simple line breaks (in HTML terms, using <BR> instead of <P> tags).
Any typographer can tell you that, while this (admittedly) saves paper, it also drastically reduces legibility. The text, compressed into illegible blocks, becomes much harder to read without spacing to allow the reader to assimilate the text.
Imagine how this writeup would look without the white space (or, if you can't, see below). . Would you find it more legible? Of course not.
Next, consider that in the nodegel, there is no paper to conserve.
Now, perhaps, you will realise that white space is not a tool of the Devil.
Examples
Without white space, it looks like this:
When composing text for presentation, many people tend to treat white space (i.e. blank lines between paragraphs), as if it were a thing to be avoided at all costs.
Perhaps this is the result of thinking in terms of limited space (a bad habit presumably learned from school assignments of the type: "...no longer than three pages of text"). To combat white space, they rely on simple line breaks (in HTML terms, using <BR> instead of <P> tags).
Any typographer can tell you that, while this (admittedly) saves paper, it also drastically reduces legibility. The text, compressed into illegible blocks, becomes much harder to read without spacing to allow the reader to assimilate the text.
Imagine how this writeup would look without the white space (or, if you can't, see below). Would you find it more legible? Of course not.
Next, consider that in the nodegel, there is no paper to conserve.
Now, perhaps, you will realise that white space is not a tool of the Devil.
...and if you take away the line breaks entirely, it gets even worse:
When composing text for presentation, many people tend to treat white space (i.e. blank lines between paragraphs), as if it were a thing to be avoided at all costs. Perhaps this is the result of thinking in terms of limited space (a bad habit presumably learned from school assignments of the type: "...no longer than three pages of text"). To combat white space, they rely on simple line breaks (in HTML terms, using <BR> instead of <P> tags). Any typographer can tell you that, while this (admittedly) saves paper, it also drastically reduces legibility. The text, compressed into illegible blocks, becomes much harder to read without spacing to allow the reader to assimilate the text. Imagine how this writeup would look without the white space (or, if you can't, see below). Would you find it more legible? Of course not. Next, consider that in the nodegel, there is no paper to conserve. Now, perhaps, you will realise that white space is not a tool of the Devil.
Addendum: For other, eloquent, statements of this concept, I refer you to wertperch's WU on white space and Gorgonzola's WU Thousand-word paragraphs give me a headache.