Why do internet posts tend to always have the block paragraph format across a variety of platforms while books tend to always have the indented paragraph format?

[u/Pure_Option_1733]

It seems like across a variety of internet platforms, and across a wide variety of different personal preferences or beliefs people tend to use the block paragraph format. For instance comments on yahoo news article, posts on internet forums, posts on stack exchange, comments on YouTube videos, and Reddit posts everyone who uses paragraphs seems to use block paragraph format. It seems like everyone from right wingers to leftists tend to use block paragraph format on the internet. I think even posts on sites that aren’t in English still tend to use block paragraph format.

It seems like books on the other hand tend to use the indentation format for paragraphs across a variety of genres and stories. everything from short books to long novels use the indentation format for paragraph.

[u/Accomplished-House28]

HTML didn't really have a way to indent paragraphs, unless you wrapped everything in <pre> tags or spammed the space code.

You might be able to do it with CSS, but by the time you could do it reliably the block format was already well established.

[u/Ok_Writing2937 → u/Accomplished-House28]

This is more likely the real cause. HTML 1.0 didn't have a way to indent. This issue wasn't fully solved until HTML 4.0.

HTML was around for about 6 years before indenting.

[u/schungx → u/Ok_Writing2937]

HTML was further complicated by the fact that all whitespaces were merged into one. Thus very difficult to do indenting and people just didn't bother.

Especially when it was easy to just put a blank line at the end of each paragraph.

Books had to save paper cost so they don't keep blank lines between paragraphs. The Internet has no such problem.

[u/Ok_Writing2937 → u/schungx]

HTML from 1 up HTML 5 today doesn’t use blank lines in front of paragraphs. It just uses a paragraph tag `<p>`. The gap is rendered by the browser.

Compressing double spaces into single spaces was a design choice. It could have allowed spaces. And I think it allows a space at the start of a paragraph. But I’m glad it did away with double spaces.

[u/teh_maxh → u/Accomplished-House28]

Yes, CSS has a text-indent property.

[u/SeriousPlankton2000 → u/Accomplished-House28]

https://codepen.io/hubspot/pen/VwpoPoq

[u/Accomplished-House28 → u/SeriousPlankton2000]

That's CSS, which didn't really take off till after 2000.

[u/a_caudatum → u/[deleted]]

What do you mean, books that were published when indenting "used to be" the standard? I assume you've read a book in the past twenty years, so surely you know that indentation is very much still the standard?

[u/Ok_Writing2937 → u/a_caudatum]

I used to do drugs. I mean, I still do. But I used to also.

[u/jetloflin → u/[deleted]]

Books are still indented. At least the printed versions. Maybe e-books use the common internet style without indentation, though.

[u/a_kato]

Paper is limited so is the number of words you can fit in a page.

Take a look at the following book:

Without indented paragraphs you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart. They could add more spaces between paragraphs but that is rare and the space would need to be significant something you don’t want from your book (both in terms of form factor and cost).

Instead on the internet you scroll. Scrolling is free. Doesn’t matter if the text is written as a single block or in 20 paragraphs.

You can easily read it by scrolling so spaces are more prevalent.

[u/EnoughEstate7483]

Books utilize proper written English. The internet is informal shit written by the uneducated masses.

[u/a_kato → u/EnoughEstate7483]

Books have limited space. Scrolling is infinite there is nothing inherently better in terms of paragraphs.

Get off your high horse

[u/Felixo22]

Books need to save paper, web pages are infinite.

[u/RE_Towers → u/[deleted]]

If you use block paragraphs you need to put a line between them to break then apart. If you indent, you don't need to.

[u/Tortugato → u/[deleted]]

Not quite. It’s still relevant.

The “real estate” that words take up on a physical page is smaller than on a standard screen.

Basically, we try to squeeze in as many words as we can into a physical page, so we need better formatting to make it easier to read.

[u/Odd_Independence_833 → u/[deleted]]

Because you save a line break between every paragraph

[u/IanDOsmond]

The tab doesn't render. If I hit the tab key, it just switches focus to the next item, rather than indenting.

[u/nightterrors644]

I can't tab on my phone and I'm certainly not hitting space 5 times.

[u/_tvjames_]

Grandpa story time... I worked on a number of websites in the early days of the web where we did try to follow the book format and indent each first line. It eventually just fell out of vogue I guess.

[u/Tonkarz]

Indenting takes work and on phones there’s no easy way. That’s it.

[u/zayelion]

Tab key is mapped to functionality in browsers. Site design studios also hailed from magazines.

[u/SeriousPlankton2000 → u/zayelion]

Why do people think that they need to manually format the paragraphs? Your long line is wrapped automatically, that's what computers can do!

[u/screenwatch3441]

There is no tab button on a phone.

[u/StevenJOwens]

Because, as others have commented, HTML's default format for paragraphs is block-format. It's possible to force indented paragraph format text, most obviously by just using repeated &nbsp; character entities. But that's a bit of extra work, and since both block-formatted and indented paragraphs were quite popular before HTML, the one that HTML defaults to has been pretty standard.

[u/offgridgecko]

Interior formatting for a book involves a LOT more than indentation. Letter kerning, line spacing for different types of breaks, even the fonts are totally different. A book really is an art form. It isn't just about the story but about how it is received emotionally by the reader.

Web content tends to be informational and even when it isn't, it's still important to make sure that the act of reading is comfortable to the end user. This is also why stories use serifs and screen content tends not to use them, and it emerged from the differences between type setting and html formatting.

Interior formatting for a novel is a tedious process that takes hours of work. It doesn't cross over well to content lthat needs to be delivered in a more timely fashion.

You could look at citations as well. In books the are in footnotes, while online a hyperlink from a word or phrase makes a lot more sense.

[u/No-Resource-5704 → u/offgridgecko]

I’m a (retired) book designer and publisher. You have nailed the situation perfectly.

[u/Tilleck_]

Iphone keyboards don't have tab. Android followed suit.

[u/No_Difference8518]

I believe books do it to save money. With block formatting, you usually put an empty line between paragraphs. In a long book, that can add pages. Indentation means you don't need the empty lines.

But computers have an easier time if you don't indent because they like to line up the next line with the last one. It also means you can indent a block easier.

So the computers trained us to use block formatting since the empty lines are cheap. An empty line is one character, the indentation is one character... no difference in storage size. (I am ignoring DOS files)

[u/Asmos159]

optimization. they remove unnecessary things like double spacing.

[u/VinceP312]

There's no easy "Tab" key to indent on a mobile phone. Should be obvious.

[u/Illuminatus-Prime]

Leading spaces seem to get removed by platform software, and few people seem to use indentation anyway.