CSS create padding before line-break

Question

Is it possible to add padding before line-break? As in, making from this to this

Answer 1

It took some tryouts, but here it is: the single- and multi-line highlighter with additional padding.

HTML:

Welcome to guubo.com, Gajus Kuizinas
So far you have joined: Networks guubo.com

CSS:

h3 {
  padding-left: 5px;
}
p {
    background: #0058be;
    position: relative;
    padding: 0 5px;
    line-height: 23px;
    text-align: justify;
    z-index: 0;
}
p span {
    background: #fff;
    padding: 2px 0 2px 5px;
    position: relative;
    left: -5px;
}
p em {
    background-color: #0058be;
    color: #fff;
    padding: 2px 5px;
}
ins {
    position: absolute;
    width: 100%;
    line-height: 23px;
    height: 23px;
    right: -5px;
    bottom: 0;
    background: #fff;
    z-index: -1;
}

The trick is to style the whole paragraph with a blue background, and only put white background on top of that at the beginning and the end. Doing so assures blue background elsewhere...;)

Two main disadvantages:

• The highlighted text has to start at the first line (but does not necessarily have to flow into a second),
• The paragraph has to be aligned with justification.

Tested in Opera 11, Chrome 11, IE7, IE8, IE9, FF4 and Safari 5 with all DTD's.

See edit history for the previous less successful attempts.