I'm using CKEditor 4, which seems to have a default setting of using <p></p> to indicate a blank line. Up to now, I've always seen blank lines in HTML represented by <p> </p> - ie. not an empty tag.
So CKEditor's default output representing a blank line is, eg:
<p>paragraph before blank line</p>
<p></p>
<p>paragraph after blank line</p>
The problem is, for a change, IE7,8,9 seems to render this "correctly" as a blank line, whereas Firefox and Chrome do not - they seem to ignore empty <p> and <div> tags, in terms of layout.
So, at the moment, I have to tell CKEditor to include in blank lines (not its default setting for some reason) and, at the back-end, replace any occurrences of empty <p> tags that may slip through.
My question is, what is the gold standard for representing blank lines in HTML? The good-old <p> </p>, or something else?
Also, given that CKEditor's default setting is an empty <p> tag for blank lines, are Chrome and Firefox wrong to ignore them? Or is IE wrong to render them as blank lines, and CKEditor's default should really be to use <p> </p>?