<span>A</span> <span>V</span>
Causes a space between these letters, how is this calculated excatly? As oppose to
<span>A</span><span>V</span>
Whitespace between inline elements is compressed (or converted if it's something other than spaces) to a single space and displayed.
The W3C specification has more information:
This layout may involve putting space between words (called inter-word space), but conventions for inter-word space vary from script to script. For example, in Latin scripts, inter-word space is typically rendered as an ASCII space ( ).
 
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