Sort not sorting revisited

I posted on this yesterday but I found the problem.  Now I'm curious to know
a little more about it.

The problem was that when sorting on this XML snippet using XSL:

<vendor_name>AAAAAAAA</vendor_name>
<vendor_name>
ZZZZZZZ
</vendor_name>

ZZZZZ would come before AAAAAAAA.  The sort was being performed by IE 6.0.
After much hair pulling, I finally figured out it was because of the
carriage return
that preceded the ZZZZZZ (the actual XML doc was much bigger, hiding the
problem).

First question: It seems odd to me that the newline character would be
considered significant and not get stripped.  Why is this not so?  Or is it
a non-compliant feature of Microsoft's implementation of XSL?

If it is the correct behavior, what's the standard practice for avoiding
this problem?


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