Agreed. It's an appalling kludge, and I bet most of these ``distraction-free writing environments'' (vomit) don't highlight the extra trailing spaces in any way.

I have the following in my .vimrc which at least makes them visible:

  set listchars=tab:»\ ,eol:¬,trail:·

Of course, having them visible doesn't change the fact that they're an appalling kludge and I still tend to use <br /> instead.