This is partly a "heads up" to other client developers who may be massaging the content of Blogger posts to be more easily editable, and partly a "proof of concept" for why I continue to argue that Blogger's unpredictable insertion of <br /> tags into the post content is annoying and sets up a fragile relationship with clients that allow verbatim editing of the content.

If a client sends literal post content such as this to Blogger:

- Paragraph 1

Paragraph 2

Paragraph 3 -

It seems to be stored literally in the database with the newlines intact, but for display purposes and (unfortunately) for generating the Atom-based feed for editors, it has <br /> tags inserted. Up until very recently, the format of the inserted tags was as complete replacements for the newlines:

- Paragraph 1<br /><br />Paragraph 2<br /><br />Paragraph 3 -

But now, each <br /> is also followed by a real newline in the returned content:

- Paragraph 1<br /> <br /> Paragraph 2<br /> <br /> Paragraph 3<br /> -

In order to give users the impression that Blogger has not mucked with their content, I have been replacing the <br /> tags with verbatim newlines in my editor. Of course, with this recent change, I am now adding too many newlines, since the newlines are already there.

Ideally, I would love to have Blogger simply return via AtomPub the same content that I had sent it.  This fragile relationship is a set up for a bad user experience, and makes it impossible for remote clients to reliably match the experience that users get when using the web-based editor.