line-breaks

I think you’re <a> tag does have a styling of display: block try display: inline-block; on on you’re <a> tag

If “line advances” are line breaks you could try wrapping the output in wpautop()

Why is WP ignoring my line breaks?

It’s really just about which bytes are stored in a file. CR is a bytecode for carriage return (from the days of typewriters) and LF similarly, for line feed. It just refers to the bytes that are placed as end-of-line markers. Way more information, as always, on wikipedia.