Seriously, I genuinely cannot see a use case where this setup would make things better, and it's quite clear that in 95% of them it just makes things harder for web developers. Pretty much no one uses this to align anything, and any use cases I can see could be done better with margins.
Just ignore the spaces between inline-block elements and instruct browsers to strip them out.
If you’re misusing inline-block for generic layout then you really should be looking at Flexbox and not trying to neuter the intended behaviour.
<s>See</s> <s>Spot</s> <s>run.</s>
<s>See</s> Spot <s>run.</s>
Given that HTML is a text markup language, it made sense for text (including whitespace) to be significant, and the SGML to be minimally disruptive. 10% tags 90% text.Now, in 2018 we want to develop applications not documents, and our HTML is now 90% tags 10% text.
In retrospect, inline should do what inline-block does now. And flexbox should have been used instead of many table/inline-block/float hacks. CSS is a mess: 20/100 foresight and 20/20 hindsight.
So, should you put spaces at the end, or at the beginning of lines in text that's broken into multiple lines?
If using code to generate HTML then you can remove white space with Google's mod_pagespeed. This will only remove a certain amount and what remains either 'doesn't matter' or is something that needs fixing in templates.
I doubt there is a performance penalty for excessive white space but it is satisfying to be able to 'view source' for the document to be pretty printed with the exception of indentation. In my opinion source documents should be neat, otherwise might aw well just give up on HTML and go for some byte code HEX digit stream in a non-human-readable format.