I have <span class="text">11-12.SL.1 Some long text</span> where text has the following styles applied:
clear: left;
display: inline;
white-space: nowrap;
word-wrap: normal;
IE however, doesn’t respect the white-space parameter.

vs Firefox, which respects it properly.

How can I get IE to respect it?
Turns out I needed to propagate the
white-spaceup to the parents =)