Comment 2 for bug 167125

It is true that those "whitespace nodes" do not affect
inkscape's behaviour, however those "whitespace nodes" are
not nodes at all. They are merely whitespace and, IINM, XML
states that whitespace is to be ignored, not interpreted as
a node.

I mean,
"<node/> <node/>" != "<node/><whitespace/><node/>"

Also, while they do not affect inkscape, they do affect
inkscape's interoperability with other programs: in this
case, svg2pdf.

I understand that all of this is really Illustrator's fault,
however, that's no reason to avoid improving what is (IMO)
the best OSS alternative to Illustrator, especially now that
there's svg2pdf.