<p>  O’er all the hilltops<br />  Is quiet now,<br />  In all the treetops<br />  Hearest thou<br />  Hardly a breath;<br />  The birds are asleep in the trees:<br />  Wait, soon like these<br />  Thou too shalt rest.</p>

p {  font-size: 1rem;  font-family: sans-serif;  margin: 20px;}

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 theglobal attributes.

clearDeprecated

Indicates where to begin the next line after the break.

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 amargin 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 theline-height property that was designed for that purpose.

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 likemargin to control their spacing.

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 />

Result

• <address> element
• <p> element
• <wbr> element