I'm using Joomla as a CMS for a website and am now using a plugin which removes unnecessary white space in the HTML code so that no unnecessary white space (within code lines) and unnecessary empty code lines are in the code generated by the CMS. This works quite well but the plugin removes also ALL linebreaks from the HTML document. This means that all HTML ends up on one code line. One drawback of this is that I have less overview when viewing the source of the code generated but I can still get a nice overview when I use FireFox in combination with the Firebug plugin so this is not a problem anymore then. However, I am now wondering if having ALL html of my web pages on one code line without any linebreaks would have any SEO implications. Does anyone have experience with this? I checked quite a few websites but don't see many sites that use something like I describe above. Maybe there are additional drawbacks (maybe SEO but maybe also other things) ? thanks!
Search engine spiders would have a parsing algorithm for the html tags. Whitespace is only there for human readability, not machine readability. The only issue I could see is if you have a line that is SO long that it overfills the spider's buffer and cuts your content off, but that would be a bad spider (I've seen some very long lines in html at times) and I doubt that google's would have that issue.