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Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

In what contexts would those two snippets of XML be treated differently? (Not that I am jumping in to defend XML I'm just curious).

If you wrote code to crawl the tree generated from that XML, you'd have text nodes (of whitespace) in one, but not the other.

That's what I thought - I don't think I've ever seen an application that would bother with that difference.

You're using that application right now - XHTML takes the difference into consideration. Consider the <pre /> tag:

  <pre><b>Hello!</b></pre>

is rendered differently from

  <pre>
     <b>Hello!</b>
  </pre>

Good point! :-)

The difference is a big deal to applications that use XML as a markup language (marking up documents and text), as it was designed to do originally.