title: White space handling in XHTML
body: <p>Is there any information on how to correctly handle white spaces in XHTML (1.0 Transitional)? It seems as if XHTML does not use standard XML white space handling.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Edit:</strong> Mayby I was a bit unprecise about what I was exactly looking for. I'm more interested in how an element gets rendered than how it would be processed by an XML processor.
  For example the following will render with 1 white space inbetween:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;em&gt; em content &lt;/em&gt; following text
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The situation gets more complicated if the space actually has its own formatting, for example <code>&lt;a href="http://www.google.de"&gt; content of the hyperlink &lt;/a&gt; content after the hyperlink</code> will have an underlined space at the end of the hyperlink, while <code>&lt;a href="http://www.google.de"&gt; content of the hyperlink&lt;/a&gt; content after the hyperlink&lt;br /&gt;</code> will not underline the the space.</p>
  
  <p>It seems as if the space is always appended to the previous formatting scope and white spaces are handled over (inline) element begin and end tags. But this is based solely on testing and I was wondering if there is some kind of specification on how excatly this behaves.</p>