The general philosophy in the Golang ecosystem is to enable powerful and expressive tools wherever possible without introducing magic. While one might typically want the latter expression to automatically strip whitespace, what happens when you do want the whitespace?
This is a problem I have in my Jade (aka Pug) templates, which trims whitespace around the contents of each element by default -- and there, I have to append `#{' '}` HTML literals at the end of lines in order to assert whitespace where I need it. But overall, the whitespace-trimming in Jade is great becuause it's a targeted, somewhat-opinionated tool, contrary to Golang standard library.
If you need/want templating to work differently, though, there's no reason to not use some other template library. Or you could fork the standard library, make modifications to suit your needs, and use that instead. It's very easy to do that with Go.
This is a problem I have in my Jade (aka Pug) templates, which trims whitespace around the contents of each element by default -- and there, I have to append `#{' '}` HTML literals at the end of lines in order to assert whitespace where I need it. But overall, the whitespace-trimming in Jade is great becuause it's a targeted, somewhat-opinionated tool, contrary to Golang standard library.
If you need/want templating to work differently, though, there's no reason to not use some other template library. Or you could fork the standard library, make modifications to suit your needs, and use that instead. It's very easy to do that with Go.