The main debate over <l> is that we have those who feel that <l>...</l> 
is likely to cause too much markup as to be practical, and those that 
feel that there needs to be some conatining element that represents 
that here is data where the line content is important.

Might I suggest as a compromise, an element similar to <pre> called
<lines>?  <lines> would indicate that the linefeed characters are 
significant as they break the content into lines. As far as visual 
presentation is concerned <lines> would be the same as <div 
class="lines"> with the following CSS3:
  .lines {white-space: pre-line}

This would serve all needs except for those cases where markup is used 
on individual lines for other purposes such as to facilitate the 
styling or scripting of individual lines. Such cases would in my 
opinion be rare and could be indicated via other markup such as:
<lines><span>Line 1</span>
<span>Line 2
      Line 3</span>
      Line        4
<span>Line 5</span></lines>

For which a default vusual rendering would be:
Line 1
Line 2
Line 3
Line 4
Line 5