Quote:
Originally Posted by Solitaire1
I'm curious: Why is CR/LF an issue when it comes to ending lines? I'm not an expert, but I would think that putting a carriage return followed by a line feed would result in a blank line after each paragraph. If I'm wrong please feel free to correct me.
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Early teleprinters (like the Teletype Model 15) used a fixed platen, a moveable carriage. The original 5 bit Baudot code had been extended to work with typewriter-like devices (instead of printing paper stripes). Two control codes were added, Carriage Return and Line Feed. These were regarded as independent movements. Moving the heavy carriage back 8 inches took a lot of time in contrast to rolling the platen 1/6 of an inch. So CR always preceded LF. In modern usage LF has been rebranded New Line and implicitly includes a CR. Unless you're overprinting a single line there is no reason to use anything besides LF (NL). For command line text usage of dynamic statistics Backspace is used to redo a field. Most programs that accept text can handle CR/LF or LF. Apple decided to use just CR for a while which really messed things up. Using just a single code for the logical end of a line makes sense. Unfortunately there are still standards that explicitly require CR/LF like HTTP/HTTPS. All headers for the web are required to have CR/LF although the content can switch to just LF.
Phew. That's a long one. Do people like it more when I break it into lines or leave it free flowing?