Options:
- Require HTML. Bad because it confuses people... the common case is for people to want linebreaks to show up in the result.
- Always insert <br/> tags for linebreaks. Bad because it breaks stuff like newlines in bullet lists¹.
- Add a “preformatted” checkbox like the rest of LJ. Bad because (I think) we don’t have the infrastructure for properties on properties. It also feels needlessly complicated.
- Try to do something intelligent based on whether they used <p> tags. Bad because trying to be intelligent usually breaks in some way.
I like #4, but only because I don’t know its limitations.
(Update: also, the bio on the userinfo page is the comparable form we already have, which appears to do #2.)
(Update 2: er, it doesn’t appear to allow HTML anyway, so I guess that answers itself.)
1 This is a bug, really, but there are other cases where someone may not want LJ’s autoformatting.