It is (probably) caused by the fact that while a_sha1 element, which
looks like this:
<a href=""> </a>
It has a firstChild which is a text node containing only whitespace
(single space character) in other web browsers (Firefox 3.5, Opera 10,
Google Chrome 3.0), IE8 clobbers DOM, removing trailing/leading
whitespace.
Protect against this bug by creating text element if it does not
exist.
Found-by: Stephen Boyd <bebarino@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>