Irrlicht Engine

The quick fix is even simpler than I thought. In CXMLReaderImpl.h at line 67, change the read() method to:

//! Reads forward to the next xml node.
//! \return Returns false, if there was no further node.
virtual bool read()
{
// if previous node was an empty element, emit an end node
if ...

Given a simple XML file containing:
<parent>
<child></child>
</parent>
You'll see IXMLReader return the following nodes:
EXN_ELEMENT "parent"
EXN_TEXT
EXN_ELEMENT "child"
EXN_ELEMENT_END "child"
EXN_TEXT
EXN_ELEMENT_END "parent"

The EXN_TEXT nodes being the whitespace in between the elements ...