Your HTML cannot be accepted: Tag is broken: BR - error

Today I tried to edit and publish an existing blog post using Blogger. I received an error Your HTML cannot be accepted: Tag is broken: BR. I create my posts using HTML and type <br /> when I want a line break. I also use the "old editor."

I tried entering a new post with the <br /> tag, and received the same error message. Hmmm. (Please read this entire post before changing any settings for your blog.)

So, I went back to the post I was editing, deleted all instances of <br /> in the HTML, and the post published successfully! And guess what? When I re-edited the post to add back a couple of <br /> tags, it published OK. Weird. But when I created a new post with new line tags, I got the error! Apparently, the <br /> tag is no longer allowed in Bloggers "old editor."

Well, I like using the <br /> tag, so I decided to change to the "Updated Editor." (Click Settings | Basic, click Updated editor under "Global Settings" at the bottom of the page, and click Save Settings. This is a global change so it went into effect for all my blogs. As soon as I did this, Blogger removed all the <br /> tags from my entire blog. I could put the tag in a post and it would publish OK, but when I would go back and look at the HTML, it would be gone.

However, I noticed that couple of my posts didn't display properly anymore, so I rashly went back to the "old editor." I say rashly because I should have looked at more posts. But several things happened. The good news was that I could now enter <br /> tags without receiving the error, but for this blog only. And the line break tags remained in the HTML. Somehow, jumping to the new editor and then back to the old editor got rid of the problem on this blog.

The bad news was that some of my posts again didn't didn't display properly, and Blogger started acting irratic and though the posts would display, the browser never said "Done" and the little swirly kept twirling. So I left the PC for 3 hours hoping Blogger would settle down. IT DID! When I returned, all the posts I checked displayed fine and loaded quickly.

Conclusion: if you stick with the old editor, try not to edit any exising posts with the <br /> tag because you will have to remove them and try to achieve the same result another way. And don't use the <br /> tag in new posts. It is best to use the new editor and decide beforehand if you want to use the tag as it is not the default. To use the tag for each post, make the setting under Post Options.

If you change to the "Updated editor," read a description of Google's Updated Editor . Here is a pertinent exerpt:

"For posts made with the new editor, the blog-level "Convert line breaks" setting (from Settings | Formatting) is ignored. Instead, newline behavior is controlled by an Edit HTML setting under "Post Options," which affects how newlines and tags are displayed in the Edit HTML editor. This means that, unlike "Convert line breaks," you can change newline behavior when it would be useful for a given post without affecting the display of all the other posts on your blog."

PS: I assume the problem happens if someone uses the <br> tag as well. Also, even though I can now mysteriously use the <br /> in this blog because of my fiddling, I still get the error message in my other blogs.)