I agree that the language is a little confusing.
Hard-wrapped text usually refers to text that has been automatically wrapped to fit a certain line width. It’s quite common in the Linux world. So when Gruber says
…Markdown supports “hard-wrapped” text paragraphs.
what he means is “Markdown will turn your hard-wrapped paragraphs into nice-looking HTML paragraphs by ignoring the line breaks that your text editor automatically added.” <br>s in HTML generally look awful and should be used extremely sparingly in web typography (they look especially bad when their positions were decided by a terminal text editor working with a monospaced font). That’s why CM requires you to explicitly specify each line break that you want preserved in HTML.
If you’re writing text where every line break is intentionally manually specified, then either
- You’re writing a lot of poetry, in which case I don’t think the default behavior should be changed for your niche usage
- You actually want those line breaks to be new paragraphs, in which case you should be using double newlines
- You actually want to specify the line break for every line of text in a normal paragraph, blatantly ignoring the fact that the appearance of the line breaks also depends on the browser’s window size and any number of CSS rules which are beyond Markdown’s control and you’re inserting cosmetic information into HTML which is awful to maintain, in which case you can spend the extra time to insert manual line breaks until you realize you should stop doing that.