Should I remove spaces at the beginning of a line containing only a footnote?

Question

I've just stumbled upon chktex, the LaTeX lint. While using it, I've noticed that it keeps giving warnings about needing to remove spaces at the beginning of lines containing only \footnote{Some footnote text}. Nothing in, e.g., this question on spaces at the beginning of lines suggests that this should be problematic, but is it?

Why does chktex complain about spaces at the beginning of a line containing a footnote?

The most minimal of MWEs:

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}
    \footnote{Some footnote text.}
\end{document}

The chktex warning:

% chktex chktexmwe.tex
ChkTeX v1.7.2 - Copyright 1995-96 Jens T. Berger Thielemann. Compiled with POSIX extended regex support. Warning 42 in chktexmwe.tex line 4: You should remove spaces in front of `\footnote' \footnote{Some footnote text.}
^ chktex: WARNING -- ChkTeX does not handle lines over 1024 bytes correctly. Some errors and line numbers may be wrong in this file. No errors printed; One warning printed; No user suppressed warnings; No line suppressed warnings

Answer 1

This is a problem, but only in certain instances. Consider the following minimal example:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
Some text\footnote{abc} with a footnote. \par
Some text \footnote{def} with a footnote. \par
Some text
\footnote{ghi} with a footnote. \par
Some text
  \footnote{jkl} with a footnote.
\end{document}

The \footnote with a preceding space (2, 3 and 4) is obviously incorrect. chktex picks up on this in a very crude or generic way and may miss it on occasion where it should also be avoided (3).

Best would be to use it appropriately the first time around. Strategic placement of % at the end of a line could avoid spacing problem (even though it might still be picked up by chktex). For example,

Some text%
\footnote{ghi} with a footnote. \par
Some text%
  \footnote{jkl} with a footnote.

provides appropriate spacing around the \footnote (for 3 and 4 above), but chktex will still complain about spacing for (4).