Wiki Quick tip: fixing break lines issues in your #TNWIKI article

When you're editing or updating an article, you might notice that some blank lines are duplicated when saving the article to TNWiki.

This is a known issue in the HTML rendering of IE to save your article to TechNet Wiki.
(Just FYI, The issue is reported, but not on the top priority list to fix, until further notice.)

There is a handy fix to get rid of this issue, very easily.

Go into the HTML of the article and replace all <br> [break line] HTML tags with </p><p> [reverse paragraph tags, closing paragraph and starting a new paragraph].

As you can't achieve this operation directly in the browser, it's better to copy the HTML code to an offline editor (even Notepad will do).

And one more tip: first deduplicate all consecutive or double <br><br> instances to a single <br> tag (per line) and then replace the <br> tag with </p><p>.

Just a quick demo...

When you create a first draft, with some basic text, it might look like
brtag-issue-1

Have a quick look at the HTML Source:

brtag-issue-2

Depending how you structured your text, you might see different HTML.
For example, a "new line" can be inserted using <enter> or <shift+enter>.. the result is different.

Please note the <p> and <br> tag combinations

brtag-issue-3

The <P>..</p> paragraph marks and the <br> break lines, both cause a split between lines.

The issue with the IE browser editor is that when you simply switch between "design" and "html" mode, the <br> tags get duplicated, quickly causing a lot of white space in your article.

How to solve it?

To show you in a very simple example, this should be the way to go: using <p></p> tags only.

brtag-issue-4

In short, the TNWiki is kind of allergic to the <br> tags.

Also, when you insert headers (like the <H1> level 1 headers), and you insert new line, it should look like:

brtag-issue-5

With the final result as:

brtag-issue-6

So, visually, you will not notice that the new line is a <p> or <br> tag.
But you definitely need to remove the <br> tags from you Wiki articles.

BTW, this kind of edits is not always visible in the change history, so now you know what has happened if you see a "zero change" update.