Is excessive whitespace in the HTML source bad?

A question from Funkman at an undisclosed location. “’Excessive White space’ in HTML source is bad. Fact, myth or somewhere in between?

We really don’t care that much. We’re pretty good you know, every time we see white space we separate stuff and we ignore the white space so it doesn’t really cause us a lot of harm in either way. The only thing to pay attention is to I have seen some sneaky people who will try to do hidden text or whatever and they’ll start off their HTML with 60 new lines. So whenever you view source you will be like oh man its blank there is no source, dude you just blew my mind. Anybody who is savvy is like or I can use the scroll bar and see what’s down here. So I would just use white space wherever it’s reasonable for you. I think some clean HTML with some nice indentation and all those sort of stuff looks good it makes your site more maintainable and makes it easy to upgrade and see what’s going on with your source and Google does a very good job about finding separators and breaking it. So don’t make one word for every 200 blank lines but otherwise if you are doing normal reasonable stuff I wouldn’t worry about it that much. I do whatever is best for you as you are maintaining the site.

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