Widely known PHP module for minifying responses - Minify (https://code.google.com/p/minify/), as one step of it's minifying process, does something rather unobvious. It adds a new line after every opened tag, just before first attribute (if such is present).
// use newlines before 1st attribute in open tags (to limit line lengths)
My question seeks for pointing out actual reasons behind this action and cases when the overhead of plenty new characters in minified output is justified by actual gain from having your lines shorter.
I found about this taking place when I recently stumbled upon JSON parsing errors, which reason was not clear. The part of minification process makes JSON responses (these that contain html tags) invalid. Alike issues you may get when having inlined JS, againg containing the tags.