Often, whitespace (space characters, newlines, tabs, etc.) are added to make the XML more "readable".

Whitespace can be marked as not significant and the XML Processor will convey that to the application.

An attribute xml:space can be added to any element to control this behavior.

A value of 'default' means that a validating processor can mark whitespace as ignorable.

A value of 'preserve' means it is significant.

Note that you need to validate to have ignorable whitespace. To get this from an XML Processor you must have a DTD.