Should we adopt a standard approach to line breaks?

[tobyhodges]

(With apologies if this has already been discussed within the project team.)

Markdown gives us the freedom to break lines in our source files in various different ways, while presenting the text as a single line/paragraph on the rendered web page.

I was previously a fan of semantic line breaks
where we can split sentences across multiple lines,
according to their natural grammatical structure.

Recently, I was made aware that semantic line breaks make automated/machine-assisted translation more difficult: tools like CrowdIn present "strings" for translation, based on the contents of each line in the source file. Because context is important in translation, files that use semantic line breaks become more difficult to translate. With this in mind, I now try to write one sentence per line in my Markdown files. Should we adopt the same approach with this handbook, to make it easier for members of our community and others to translate?

[maneesha]

Thanks for opening this issue @tobyhodges
This has been on my mind as well. In addition to the semantic line breaks and sentence line breaks, we also see a lot of content that originally conformed to a set number of characters per line (79 is a common limit). When subsequent edits are made, we end up with some lines that are short and some that are long, with no consistency at all.

I think this is a larger question to consider across all our resources (websites, handbook, lessons, etc.). I am keeping this open as a reminder to come back to next year.

[tobyhodges]

Speaking for lessons, I am definitely in favour of switching to sentence line breaks. The thing that has been holding me back is the prospect of trying to roll that out across 60+ existing lessons. I'd be delighted to discuss any possibility of a coordinated (semi-)automated approach.

[froggleston]

I would also prefer sentence line breaks - it's much easier on git diffs too!

80/100/arbitrary character limits are typically for code only, and back when screens/terminals were 80 fixed characters.