Why is <br> an element, not an entity? [duplicate]

Question

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Why is <br> an HTML element rather than an HTML entity?

Why is a line break in HTML an element <br> instead of an entity, such as &br;? In many ways it seems a bad fit to be an element (e.g. has a different node type attribute to normal HTML elements, is similar to   in what it does).

Answer 1

Whitespace in HTML is rendered as a one character space regardless of the amount of whitespace. This assists in markup authorship without impacting the markup rendering.

<br/> is not a display character, but a formatting specifier for when the format affects the content's meaning. The HTML 5 spec states that it "must be used only for line breaks that are actually part of the content, as in poems or addresses."