Question

I was using the advice given here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/5174967 to lay out some form elements inline. It suggested using word-spacing: -1em; on the parent element and then resetting the spacing back to normal. I found that I didn’t need to reset the word-spacing on the form elements inside the <form> tag.

  form
  {
     word-spacing: -1em;
  }

  input,
  textarea
  {
    width: 90%;
    display: inline-block;
    vertical-align: middle;
  }

  label span
  {
     display: inline-block; 
     width: 10%;
     vertical-align: middle;
  }

Answer 1

No, there are no special rules for word-spacing in forms. You can see this by viewing <form>hello world</form> as styled with your (malformed) style sheet. But word-spacing affects spacing between words only, for some (partly browser-dependent) definition for “word”.

Using negative word spacing to deal with spacing of inline blocks is unreliable trickery, and it is not the accepted answer to the question you refer to.