In my 20s, I didn't think it was necessary to close your <p> tags when writing HTML.
@benbrown It was better to use two <br>s anyhow. More control over spacing. Never let <p> have control.
Ha! No! I am [jokingly] horrified by this comment!
So jokes aside, I'd say p and br have very important differences:
p is a semantic label, saying this is a paragraph. Render (or read or anything) it as you think best.
br is a command to insert a line break, saying nothing about why it's in there or what the content is.
Each has its place, and (as I recall) p is especially powerful because with stylesheets you can both say what you've written AND order it to be spaced the way you want.
Yeah, that's definitely a concern, and I'm glad we did develop stylesheets to address it.
(Setting aside issues of how *well* the stylesheets actually worked in the real world, that is.)
Still, this gets into the different schools of thought as to whether it's more important to convey the author's intent or to give the viewer what they want.
It's a debate with arguments on both sides, but yep, br is the tool for the author's intent and p is the tool to empower the reader.
And of course this actually ends up mattering more than just superficially when accessibility and screen readers come up.
@corbden yes these files have <P> tags interspersed with <BR><BR>s all over the place
@volkris @benbrown My HTML learning predates style sheets and I had to learn CSS later. My intent was for all the text (unless otherwise tagged) remain the same. I found that sometimes <p> did the spacing weird or changed my typeface/styles, especially once style sheets newfangled their way on the scene.