[code lang="html"]

[/code]

While innoccuous in static pages, it becomes problematic when DOM nodes get updated after a delay by some Javascript, as the separating whitespace has disappeared, hence ruining the layout of your text.

Surprisingly, I haven’t found any reference to this IE bug (not that there is a shortage of complaints about other IE idiosyncrasies), so I thought I’d share the problem and the solution I have found here. It’s all demonstrated in the following example:

[code lang="html"]
< !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

world

  world

[/code]

In the first case, the whitespace gets stripped, thus resulting in “Helloworld”. In the second example, the non-breaking space prevents IE from stripping the whitespace, so that when the span is filled by Javascript, the text reads “Hello world” as expected.

If you know other solutions or whether it’s considered a bug that will be fixed, please post in the comments!