This sentence is a long paragraph, which does not contain any <br> tags, but relies on the max-width style to break the lines.

This sentence is a paragraph which
is broken into
three lines, using two “big” <br> tags, and then one line which is broken by exceeding the max-width.

This sentence is the third paragraph.

The most convenient use of this technique is via a class, to allow simple selective styling of the <br> tag, like this:

  br.big {line-height:180%;vertical-align:top}
  …
  {regular-spaced line break}<br>
  {bigger line break}<br class=big>

This has been tested under Windows 10 (64-bit) with nine web browsers: Chrome 66.0.3359.181, Firefox Quantum 60.0.2, Opera 53.0.2907.68, Chromium 55.0.2883.11, Brave 0.22.727, Edge 42.17134.1.0, IE 11.48.17134.0, PaleMoon 27.9.2, and Tor 7.5.3.

The “big” <br> tag works properly in all nine.

Firefox, Edge, IE, PaleMoon & Tor properly hyphenate the text in the first paragraph. Chrome, Chromium, Opera & Brave (the four Chrome-derived browsers) do not.

– Dave Burton  6/10/2018