HTML is not about presentation, it's about semantic structure. You can build a list with paragraphs, line breaks, and the bullet point character; it will look about the same if you do. But anything that isn't a human looking at your website won't be able to tell it's a list; they'll see it for exactly what it is, a bunch of paragraphs with bullet point characters. So things like screen readers might read it incorrectly, trying to actually pronounce the bullet point. Software like Google's indexing engines won't be able to treat the list as a list of potential keywords or search terms, or to pull it out into an info box for display. Using semantic HTML allows for machines to parse your page just as easily as humans. Answer from scirc on reddit.com