About Line Breaking in HTML...
= Index DOT Html by Brian Wilson [bloo@blooberry.com] =

Justification

A rule of thumb in HTML is that line breaking is determined by the browser. This is due to the intrinsic uncertainty of the size of the display area for an HTML document. Of course an author will occasionally wish to force a line break in a document. Thankfully, HTML provides this facility. It also provides a means of explicitly controlling general line breaking behavior as well. It is generally safer to leave this behavior in the hands of the browser, but several newer extensions to HTML in other areas have made the normal line breaking behavior inadequate to handle many design situations.

Controlling Line Breaking

[<br>, <nobr>, <wbr>]

The simplest of the line breaking control mechanisms is the BR tag. It forces a line break within document content. Several new extensions to this tag control line breaking under the special situations arising from using floating objects (such as images and tables.) The two remaining line break tags, NOBR and WBR, are used in situations where the author wants to disable the basic HTML behavior. NOBR turns off the normal line breaking behavior, and the WBR tag is used to explicitly break up content within these sections.

In addition to these explicit line breaking mechanisms, there are several other HTML tags whose intent is not specifically to control line breaking, but is an added benefit. The Listing, Plaintext, Pre, and Xmp tags all disable the normal HTML line breaking behavior to some degree. Use your best judgement as to which tag best suits your needs.

Official References

ftp://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1866.txt

RFC 1866: The HTML 2.0 specification (plain text)

http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/MarkUp/html-spec

The web version of the HTML 2.0 (RFC 1866) specification

http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/MarkUp/Wilbur/

The HTML 3.2 (Wilbur) proposal
[Includes all HTML 2 line breaking elements]

http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/MarkUp/Cougar/HTML.dtd

The experimental HTML (Cougar) draft
[Demonstrates some of the directions HTML is taking]

http://home.netscape.com/assist/net_sites/html_extensions.html

Netscape Extensions to HTML 2.0
[Explains the NOBR and WBR tags as well as the CLEAR attributes to the BR tag.]

http://www.microsoft.com/workshop/author/newhtml/htmlr020.htm

Internet Explorer 3.0 Tag reference
[Includes usage of all line breaking elements]