If you mean the crazy amount of whitespace, it may be caused by a templating system. For instance, in JSP JSTL: <c:choose> <c:when test="${!empty article}"

If you mean the crazy amount of whitespace, it may be caused by a templating system. For instance, in JSP JSTL: <c:choose> <c:when test="${!empty article}"> <c:out value="${article}"/> </c:when> <c:when test="${!empty comments}"> <c:out value="${article}"/> </c:when> </c:choose> Each of the choose/when tags has a newline after it, so even though the tag is not output into the resulting HTML source, it causes a literal newline to be emitted. This doesn't normally matter, since HTML collapses multiple runs of whitespace into a single space. However, for places where you can't have any whitespace (like the middle of a word) you can work around that by concatenating all the tags into one long line, or by strange arrangements of opening/closing angle brackets: <c:choose ><c:when test="..." ><c:out ... / ></c:when ></c:choose> Some webservers like Tomcat also provide the ability to strip all excess outgoing whitespace, which preserves the readability of the source files.