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It specifies where it would be OK to add a line-break where a word is too long, or it is perceived that the browser will break a line at the wrong place. Whether the line actually breaks is then left up to the browser. The break will look like a space - see soft hyphen below when it would be more appropriate to break the word or line using a ...
However, single line breaks in the source do have certain effects: Within a list, a single line break starts either the next item or a new paragraph; within an indentation (which, if marked up with leading colons, is really the definition part of a definition list), a single line break aborts the indentation and starts a new paragraph. Links do ...
Line breaks or newlines are used to add whitespace between lines, such as separating paragraphs. A line break that is visible in the content is inserted by pressing ↵ Enter twice. Pressing ↵ Enter once will place a line break in the markup, but it will not show in the rendered content, except when using list markup.
See: Help talk:Table#Line breaks. David Göthberg noted in 2008: "Also up until recently all documentation listed <br> as the code for forced line breaks. But some months ago some XHTML enthusiasts went around and edited a lot of the help pages to show the <br /> or even the <br/>."
A soft return or soft wrap is the break resulting from line wrap or word wrap (whether automatic or manual), whereas a hard return or hard wrap is an intentional break, creating a new paragraph. With a hard return, paragraph-break formatting can (and should) be applied (either indenting or vertical whitespace).
To be clear I'm not talking about mid-sentence line breaks (like a programmer might use to avoid using more than a certain number of characters per line) I'm talking about things like formatting citations with line breaks (sometimes) and (more often) subdividing a the big blocks of wikimarkup in a paragraphs with an occasional line break in the ...
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For code readability (the improvement is more apparent when the paragraphs are long, rather than with short examples like these), line-breaks may be created with HTML comments, <!-- ... -->, that begin on one line against the end of that line's code and end on another line, against the beginning of that line's code: