Huh, I wonder why they included the CSS2.1 value "pre-wrap" but omitted "pre-line"? Not that it matters, I'm not trying to make pages that require CSS2.1 quite yet :) Anyway, they claim IE5.5 supports "normal", but of course at some level every browser supports "normal". The bug seems to be that I can't explicitly declare "normal" to override a different white-space property value inherited from the container block.