@codinghorror: Can we please, please get rid of this horrible feature? What does it add? If I want to change the line breaks, let me. How does preventing me from doing so make the system better?
I was trying to edit my post here. It’s very difficult to insert visible line breaks between chunks of quoted text, because the preview shows something different to what gets posted (preview shows white gaps between the blocks, which disappear when posting) so I kept trying different variations. Each time I did so I had to change the punctuation because of that message.
Finally, I hit upon the “correct” solution (putting a space before the > in the second quoted block), and now I still can’t add the period back to the end of my first sentence, because it has a memory of that edited version and thinks it’s the same as the original version (without breaks between the blocks).
Sure, I could change something else and finally be allowed to fix the grammar of my post, but why should I be forced to?
Edit: Less emotionally, here are two three reasons I think you should change it:
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You may believe that white space changes don’t affect the body of the post, but it does, as my experience with needing to put an extra space before the > to break up quoted text showed. I’m sure there are other cases where white space inadvertently affects the post.
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Even if you have eliminated all cases where whitespace affects the post, it still does not add to the user experience to present them with the message.
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Are you saving the raw version of the user’s post for later editing? (You seem to be, as my multi-carriage-return paragraphs here appear to return to me unmolested when editing.) If so, even whitespace that is not visible in the published post may be helpful to the author, to allow them to break up their own text better when editing.
