This should make the unit tests more readable, and it also prevents
failures where a changed fromXML() implementation fails to ignore
interspersed whitespace. This has recently caused some developer
nuisance; see https://github.com/behdad/fonttools/pull/367.
Instead of having a custom parser implementation, it would be nicer
to call the actual XMLReader. However, XMLReader has a deeply built-in
assumption that it is processing an entire TTX file. Changing this
assumption would certainly be possible, but it would need a re-write
of the XMLReader code; having a custom parser just for unit tests
seems less involved.