Blogger: break "convert line breaks"

Blogger's "convert line breaks" setting seems to cause a lot of pain, and what's more, it doesn't even seem to work. I get gratuitous <br/> in my code despite having set this setting to OFF. The issue and some workarounds are discussed on Rob on Programming, The Real Blogger Status, and MLA Wire.

The trouble is, if you've chosen to edit in "Edit Html" mode, it's reasonable to suppose that you know what you're doing, and you want the html code of your post to be exactly what you write. In other words, I can take care of my own <p> and <br> tags.

Blogger doesn't think so. And here's my revenge - I added this to the "style" section of my template:

  br { display: none; }
  br.forReal { display:inline; }

This way, I never have to think about Blogger's thoughtful, kind, but misguided insertion of line breaks again. And when I want a line break for real, which isn't very often (I'm more of a <p>...</p> person), I just

  <br class='forReal'/>

So I can make a table thusly*:

<table style="width:auto;" cellpadding="1" cellspacing="1" border="1">
  <tr>
    <td>foo</td>
    <td>bar</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>toto</td>
    <td>titi</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Which looks like

foo	bar
toto	titi

Slight problem: it has probably gone and damaged all my old posts. What a pain!

* I know, "thusly" isn't a word. I don't care.