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Useful? Yes.

But then you need some way to provide the exact indentation/spacing in some cases. And the easiest is to provide them verbatim.

HTML has the "pre" element that does this.

pre does a lot more than respect newlines.

"white-space:pre-line" in CSS should make it only break on hard enters. There are a bunch of values; see e.g. MDN.

Can be used on any element of course, not just <pre>.

No?

The Firefox default style sets a fixed width font and sets a small margin. What's "a lot more"?