<br>: The Line Break element

The HTML <br> element produces a line break in text (carriage-return). It is useful for writing a poem or an address, where the division of lines is significant.

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As you can see from the above example, a <br> element is included at each point where we want the text to break. The text after the <br> begins again at the start of the next line of the text block.

This element's attributes include the global attributes.

The <br> element has a single, well-defined purpose — to create a line break in a block of text. As such, it has no dimensions or visual output of its own, and there is very little you can do to style it.

You can set a margin on <br> elements themselves to increase the spacing between the lines of text in the block, but this is a bad practice — you should use the line-height property that was designed for that purpose.

In the following example we use <br> elements to create line breaks between the different lines of a postal address:

Mozilla<br>
331 E. Evelyn Avenue<br>
Mountain View, CA<br>
94041<br>
USA<br>

The result looks like so:

Creating separate paragraphs of text using <br> is not only bad practice, it is problematic for people who navigate with the aid of screen reading technology. Screen readers may announce the presence of the element, but not any content contained within <br>s. This can be a confusing and frustrating experience for the person using the screen reader.

Use <p> elements, and use CSS properties like margin to control their spacing.