Collapsed whitespace in spans (ODF all versions)

Dear all,

Another whitespace problem (proving Goldfarb's law, perhaps):

5.1.3 <text:span>:

----b
White-space characters contained in this element are collapsed.
----e

By this logic it is not possible to represent the text "_Hello_World_"
(i.e. the text "Hello World" with a leading and trailing space, with the
entire string underlined) by using a span with an associated style, as
those leading and trailing spaces would get stripped.

I have checked with a popular ODF application, and it sensibly ignores
this collapsing provision. It has:

<text:span text:style-name="T1"> Hello World </text:span>

I think the spec need to be brought into conformity with the application
...

- Alex.