You can try it out and see that I'm right.

I created a page like this:

  <div><a href="#">foo </a> bar</div>

  <script>
    divElement = document.getElementsByTagName("div")[0]
    console.log('"' + divElement.childNodes[0].firstChild.data + '"')
    console.log('"' + divElement.childNodes[1].data + '"')
  </script>

And you'll see in the console:

  "foo "
  " bar" 

So yes, the DOM itself contains what I and the poster before mentioned. It's the presentation layer that decides how to do space collapse.

As a bonus, you can also see that the DOM of the page has four children of `body`: `<div>`, then a text node with the content "\n\n", `<script>`, and another text node containing "\n".

Tested all this with a simple HTML I saved on disk and opened in Firefox.