The following

<div class="h-entry"> <div class="e-content"> this should have whitespace trimmed </div> </div>

is parsed as

"content": [ { "html": "\r\n this should have whitespace trimmed\r\n\r\n\r\n", "value": "this should have whitespace trimmed" }

whereas according to the parsing specification whitespace at beginning and end of the HTML content should be trimmed as well:

html: the innerHTML of the element by using the HTML spec: Serializing HTML Fragments algorithm, with leading/trailing whitespace removed.