XML, DOM and "ignorable" whitespace

Hi,
I'm having a problem with jaxp1.0 and "ignorable" whitespace.

As any example, I have an element that has two child elements but the
DOM ends up having a TEXT node with a linefeed in it. This means the
element has three children which did not happen in xml-tr2. I do not
have a mixed content model DTD and I am using parsing with validation.

XML 1.0
Section 2.10 Whitespace handling
"... white space is typically not intended for inclusion in the
delivered version of the document"

Section 2.11 End-of-line Handling
"normalizing all line breaks to #xA on input before parsing"

I'm just really confused and have looked at the specs and can't find
what I need to do. Plus alot of my code is broken unless I squeeze the
whitespace out of my documents and then they are not so editable or
readable.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Eric :-)
p.s. I posted comp.text.xml  and www-dom with no replies.