> the title is referring to inside html attributes, where they will be removed hence not affect where the link points.

I thought so too, until I read the URL definition in RFC 1738

   In some cases, extra whitespace (spaces, linebreaks, tabs, etc.) may need to be added to break long URLs across lines.  The whitespace should be ignored when extracting the URL.

   No whitespace should be introduced after a hyphen ("-") character. Because some typesetters and printers may (erroneously) introduce a hyphen at the end of line when breaking a line, the interpreter of a URL containing a line break immediately after a hyphen should ignore all unencoded whitespace around the line break, and should be aware that the hyphen may or may not actually be part of the URL.