How the Browser Handles the preserveWhiteSpace Property

If you have HTML presented as well-formed XML, the preserveWhiteSpace property should have no impact on the Web page displayed in the browser. HTML browsers automatically remove excess white space upon display, unless it is contained in <pre></pre> (preserve) or <xmp></xmp> (example) tags.

In the MSXML processor, if preserveWhiteSpace is set or defaulted to False, the XSLT white space features will have no effect. In addition, for Internet Explorer 5.0 and later, the XML parser is set to ignore unnecessary white space from XSLT transformations. (In other words, preserveWhiteSpace is set to False). To see these results, you must first transform the output through an Active Server Page (ASP) or Microsoft JScript® script, or a similar mechanism. You cannot rely on XSLT alone to see the result of most of the white space options.