What is whitespace?
Most HTML and XML documents are currently encoded in so-called 7-bit ASCII TEXT characters (as opposed to 8-bit binary encoding). A number of these ASCII characters are known as Whitespace (spaces, newlines, tabs) and are a valuable tool for human presentation but these are not usually considered as part of the fundamental content. They are used for delimiters (e.g. to separate words and numbers) and to provide formatting.
