title: Is there a HTML character that is blank (including no whitespace) on all browsers?
body: <p>Is there a HTML character that, on all (major) browsers (plus IE8 sadly) displays nothing and doesn't add any extra space?</p>
  
  <p>So, an alternative to <code>&amp;nbsp;</code> but which doesn't add whitespace to the page, and which won't ever show up as an ugly "unrecognised character" marker or <code>?</code>.</p>
  
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  <p>Why: in my case, I'm trying to work around a problem on an old, proprietary CMS that is removing empty but necessary HTML elements that are required because other parts of the system will fill them dynamically. </p>
  
  <p>Imagine something like (simplified trivial example) <code>&lt;span class="placeholder" data-type="username"&gt;&lt;/span&gt;</code> which is populated with a user's username if a user is logged in - but this old-school CMS sees it as being empty and removes it.</p>