How should I format the HTML of my blog posts in Blogger?

Question

For convenience, I write all my blog posts in bare HTML. Everything seems to be working, but I see that sometimes, Blogger's WYSIWYG editor wraps everything up in a <div> and uses <p> tags. Should I use those? I usually just type in raw text and use double <br> tags to differentiate between paragraphs. Is this acceptable?

Answer 1

You shouldn't use br elements for separating paragraphs. From the HTML5 specification:

br elements must be used only for line breaks that are actually part of the content, as in poems or addresses.

A paragraph should be enclosed in a p element.

The div element doesn't add/change any meaning. At most it changes the styling of the content (via CSS; depends on the theme). So you can omit it if you are happy with the design of your content.