Space Before Closing Slash?

Question

I\'ve frequently seen a space preceding the closing slash in XML and HTML tags. The XHTML line break is probably the canonical example:

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Answer 1

What if there was a very lazy html writer out there or maybe he had a fear of quotation marks. Consider the following if you were his robot page crawler...

versus

This might seem small but look what it can do if the space isn't there. The robot won't know if the slash is part of the url or part of the closing tag.