Thanks Ed and Jim--this has been very helpful to understand the issues involved. I can see that turning whitespace into a component is going to wreak havoc with h:panelGrid and such. But in this case, all that would need to be done is to add one (or all) white space character to the preceding component that holds the static text.
Like I said, I couldn't find anything in the spec that mandated one kind of behavior or another, so I am hopeful that this can be solved with some ingenuity in the RI.
Thanks,
Cay
[Message sent by forum member 'cayhorstmann' (cayhorstmann)]
http://forums.java.net/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=356169