While it is tempting to quickly skim an blog entry for the information I’m seeking at the time, a recent find on dealing with white space with JSPs reminded me that there is a darn good reason most blogs have a comment feature.
The thread I’m talking about is Trim Spaces in Your JSP at Raible Designs. Fortunately, my paranoia paid off, and I did not try this setting blindly on the project where I was looking for such an answer (and have since rolled off). I almost did, but decided not to because I knew I would not be around to support the change, and that whoever I told about it may forget it. As it is a performance enhancement and the application had some peformance issues (too many cooks in the presentation layer kitchen IMHO), it was not as easy of a call as it may seem.
The con that comes up in the comments on that post is that it wipes all white space between tags. If I were the only person developing on the project, or if was a small team where I knew for certain that only experience JSP developers were working on the JSPs, I’d still feel safe. This is because if a space has to be in a page between two dynamic parameters, the experienced JSP developer will use an entity code rather than just a blank space.
There is also a comment in the thread about how to cut down white space in a build file. That was actually the type of solution I was seeking at the time (and missed at the time). I would have to experiment with the solution before I suggested it, but it looks like what I wanted.