badly formed end tags

Hi,

I got some unexpected output from Tidy today when I a html document had an
endtag containing a carriage return, i.e
<center> Some text centered on the web page </
center>

I can understand why Tidy produced this...

<center> Some text centered on the web page &lt;/
center&gt;</center>

Viewing the non-tidied source in I.E. rendered what the web programmer
wanted displayed.

Would it be a major piece of work to get tidy to recognise whitespace within
tags?  Is that valid HTML that Tidy should be trying to cope with, or is it
badly written HTML.

Thanks.
Adrian Lester