how do I get firefox to ignore certain html standards?

a couple of years ago I was teaching myself html, and one of the things I learned is that if an html document has multiple whitespace characters between two words (and by words I mean any text at all), it will render it as one space. :confused:

This is perhaps the most annoying things about html; I want to be able to send ascii art in emails, and on instant messaging; however I can't because of this idiotic standard. So I started trying to find out if my web browser (firefox version 3.6.22) could be configured to ignore this, but so far the answer seems to be no.:mad:

I just thought I would check on the forums to see if any has ever tried this, and if they had any success.

<pre>
whatever you want


here
</pre>
Here is a link if i did it wrong
w3schools.com/tags/tag_pre.asp

thank you for that

Otherwise you can write the space in HTML code and comply with the standards: &nbsp; = one space &nbsp;&nbsp; = two spaces and so on...