There's currently a slight difference between how newlines are handled for xml:space=default (treated as presentation attribute for 'white-space' w/ value 'nowrap') and "white-space: normal". The difference would seem to boil down to this sentence:
"First, it will remove all newline characters."
(See LayoutSVGInlineText.cpp:applySVGWhitespaceRules for how this is applied.)
Simple example:
https://jsfiddle.net/asyrzuz2/
Blink/WebKit renders this is in one way - no space between 'Foo' and 'bar' - while all other browsers (IE11, Edge, Firefox/Gecko and Presto) render with a space between the two words.
Uncertain how big of a deal this will be to change in practice, but if doing it (which I think we should), then we should probably do it sooner rather than later (possibly as close after a branch as possible.)
With this "fixed" I think we should be closer to be able to use the common white-space handling. (The 'preserve' handling remains an issue - with some steps taken in spec already, see annotation in https://svgwg.org/svg2-draft/text.html#LegacyXMLSpace)
(Setting this as blocking issue 366558, although technically it doesn't need to.)
Comment 1 by supriyan...@gmail.com
, Apr 14 2016