What does Google have against line-breaks?

I find this to be off and really strange all-over Google and its apps and interfaces;

Google overrides the new-lines I create, it strips them from entered text everywhere, or adds extra ones to my texts. What do they have against proper line break formatting? It’s the same in gmail, usenet/groups, YouTube comments and captions, basically everywhere where text is entered and then shown online. Everywhere where Google processes my input.
I know many CMS interfaces (like the one I’m typing this in) that simply convert linebreaks to < br/ > or < p > < /p > when posted online. Such is really simple to implement and very good looking. It improves readability of texts, improves clarity for separating subject matter etc. Come on Google, this is a PHP Coding Basics Lesson 1 issue. How hard can it be?

Enter text with a linebreak in a form that google will later show online somewhere, and it will come out looking like pure shit.
Whenever I write, I always insert my own linebreaks, just like when I used to do on a type-writer and on the first PC’s. I always pick the spots where I want each new line to appear in my text. Now obviously both Googlemail’s web interface and the Usenet Groups message compose section inserts new line-breaks at positions unknown to the user while writing and posting. All my messages look like they’ve been written by an idiot in Google services, while in fact I had written a really good looking message, where the line-breaks had some added functionality. Be they marking the start of a new sentence, or a good separation of content, or poetry-like usage of text. Either way: My breaks really need to be in there.

I would very much like to set either the maximum length of each line, or be able to switch off line-wrapping and the gmail insertion of breaks altogether. I’m convinced this is really annoying to me and many others, to not be able to change this.

In 2002 I already notified them about this, I contacted Google developers when they just started doing it. They then replied they would look at it “as soon as they could”. Here we are, almost nine years later, and the line-break issue has not improved. It now even makes YouTube comments look like crap because every new line is removed from your input. Dude, WTF?

This Post Has One Comment

  1. Dov

    So sad, so true…

Leave a Reply