I’m not saying you can’t put carriage returns bullets or whatever in one stack and make it as long as you like.
What I’m saying is it’s not the proper way to do it. It throws off the vertical rhythm of the text.
The op wanted to know how to get proper formatting like a word processor. A word processor creates a paragraph when you have a carriage return, HTML does not. You only get a new paragraph tag when you use another paragraph stack.
I understand it seems like a pain, I myself have been known to just add a carriage return and move on. But that is not the proper way to do it.
This has been discussed many times.
here is a post about it by Andrew Tavemor @tav that explains it better than I can.