HTML normally answers the question of whether white space is significant or not by predefining the meaning of white space in particular elements. For instance, white space is significant inside <pre> and </pre> tags. It's not significant almost everywhere else. This means that if you want to preserve line breaks without using a monospaced font, you need to insert a lot of <br> tags as in this first stanza from William Blake's poem The Tyger:



Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

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