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It's probably standard HTML rendering that is collapsing the spaces. That will happen unless you put an explicit space using  .

Yes, HTML collapses whitespace. It's to allow you to format and structure your source html with linebreaks and indentation without it effecting the output.

If you don't want it to collapse you would use a "Non-breaking space"

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-breaking_space#Use_as_non-c...

It is, yes.

HTML ignores whitespace, unless it's inside a <pre> tag, or when IE randomly decides not to for in-line elements when rendering some CSS rules. ;)