[dkh]

I think you might be misunderstanding. The semantic line breaks described here are not shown to readers. They are visible only to the person writing/editing the text, as a tool for their own use. If you aren't someone who finds a tool like this useful for your own writing, then no worries! Nobody has been harmed by this existing but not being used. It has no effect on the result.

While I never knew there was a name for this, I naturally do something very similar when writing, keeping thoughts separated by at least a line or two, even if I imagine they'll be in the same paragraph in the end result, just so I have a visual sense of where my different thoughts are and how long they are.

[necovek]

GP brought the point up that addresses this: "why deprive readers of extra clarity offered by this formatting?"

So if this is something that's valuable when reading or editing material, why not extend that to the final, rendered output?

To me, this smells of micro-optimization that's not well thought through: where are the boundaries between being able to edit vs being able to read? If we make every word be on a line by itself, you can use remove-line command in your editor, and diffs will automatically become word-diffs, and it would encourage writers to limit sentences to clearer sentences by fitting them into one ~50 line/word screen. By using double newlines, you can still keep "semantic" newlines too. Wouldn't that be appealing? "No" is what I would say.

[pests]

I’ve always done similar. My initial writing is a disconnected jumble of sentence parts, sentences, more fleshed out paragraphs, etc just to get ideas out and they later get organized into something cohesive.

[eviks]

> are not shown to readers.

Sure they are, though the spec hides some readers behind other names like "editors, and other collaborators"

But also, have you never read the plain text / source of some markdown/other markup language written by someone else? Readme.md in its raw form?

And the spec explicitly applies to plain text, so it's self-contradictory as "the final rendered output" of plain text is... itself.

[tolerance]

I like your extension of the term “readers” but I don’t think that’s the intended use for this matter. And if it were, would it be safe to assume that editors and other collaborators would consent to this standard?

> But also, have you never read the plain text / source of some markdown/other markup language written by someone else? Readme.md in its raw form?

That’s beside the point because the spec states "A semantic line break must not alter the final rendered output of the document.”

And I think you’re misinterpreting what “plain text” refers to here. Not .txt files exclusively, but the markup languages mentioned as well that are...plain text. The final rendered output of these kind of documents are not themselves.

The expectation is that the source of whatever flavor of plain text is not the final output.

If this practice offends you, don’t use it. This is a specification suggesting a practice for you* to use.

How have you been able to manage with hard-wrapped text elsewhere?