Visual Studio 2010 breaks HTML formatting

Question

Is there any way to get Visual Studio 2010 to properly format HTML code when reformatting?

In HTML,

<div><span></span></div>

is different than

<div> <span></span> </div>

because of the space after the <div>.

Once there is a space, it doesn't matter how many spaces or line breaks there are... so

<div> <span></span> </div>

is the same as

<div> 
    <span></span> 
</div>

However, the editor is quite happy to insert or remove spaces/linebreaks between tags. For most cases, that won't matter much, but in some cases, it is critical to control whether there is whitespace between tags.

Similarly, I may want to have <span> </span> with space between the tags, but the editor removes that space!

Is there any solution to this?

Answer 1

Use   if you want to make sure that space is conserved. Browsers may optimize out empty divs for example (see this question), and containing only whitespace is considered being empty.