Question

Is it generally considered good practice to use <br /><br /> to skip a line, or is there another method that should be used? Seems to me like something that would be frowned upon, but I can’t think of an alternative.

Answer 1

It is generally considered as bad practice. Although browsers rather consistently implement <br><br> as creating an empty line, there is really no guarantee of such behavior; logically, it just means breaking a line twice. More importantly in practice, you have little to style, little if any control over the amount of vertical spacing. So using normal block elements with vertical margins works better.

HTML5 drafts take a strong position in their description of the br element: “br elements must be used only for line breaks that are actually part of the content, as in poems or addresses.”