I have just confirmed on my test Moodle 1.3 beta the following:
- striking the [Enter] key in Firefox/Mozilla inserts a <br> in the HTML area resulting in the 'new paragraph' appearing on the next line. [Shift][Enter] does nothing. The only way to add a <p> is to use the Toggle HTML source and insert the tag. This is actually bad behaviour; IMO [Enter] should insert a <p> </p> tag. However, even though [Enter] inserts a <br> tag, creating new list items by hitting [Enter] also works (why, I don't know).
- hitting the [Enter] key in Internet Exploder inserts <p> and [Shift][Enter] inserts <br> - which we knew already.
What to do:
- I don't think that there's any way around this. After all we are dealing with an HTML editor and not MS Word. I haven't tried many different editors - just the usual suspects - but my guess is that [Enter] inserts a <p> by default in all of them.
- My suggested solution would be simply to use Firefox or Mozilla instead of I.E for Moodle. This would also introduce the user to the joys of a browser that supports WC3 standards fully and allows tabbed browsing among other assets. But remember to fix the javascript issue as described in http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=7543&parent=37117.