It is as designed. Bare text whose parent is a structural tag will not have its whitespace condensed. This set of structural tags is:
Code:
static std::unordered_set<std::string> structural_tags = {
"article","aside","blockquote","body","canvas","colgroup","div","dl",
"figure","footer","head","header","hr","html","ol","section",
"table","tbody","tfoot","thead","td","th","tr","ul"
};
So if you were to make that bare text the child of a p tag or a span tag, and place it inside a structural tag, then the text whitespace would be condensed.