Simples Assim

Even though SOAP 1.1, which is still the most widely implemented version, apparently doesn’t, SOAP 1.2 specifies that whitespace-only nodes aren’t to be ignored:

The Detail element information item MAY have any number of character information item children. The character code of each such character information item MUST be amongst the white space characters as defined by XML 1.0 [XML 1.0]. These are considered significant.

I don’t know why, but I will ask the XML Protocol Working Group.

Java EE, .NET and Progress OpenEdge, at least, don’t ignore them.