title: A better alternative than &nbsp; for showing empty HTML table cells?
body: <p>It's a classic problem - when you have an empty table cell the browser doesn't render borders around it. There are also two well-known workarounds. One is to place an <code>&amp;nbsp;</code> in the table cell; the other is to use the <code>empty-cells:show</code> CSS property.</p>
  
  <p>Unfortunately both have drawbacks. <code>&amp;nbsp;</code> is kind of ugly when it comes to selecting text and copy-pasting it. You get a lot of spaces where there shouldn't be any, perhaps even with an exotic Unicode character. <code>empty-cells:show</code> should address exactly this problem, but unfortunately it only works properly in IE starting with version 8 (and then only in standards-compliant mode). It can be made to work in other versions by also specifying <code>border-collapse: collapse</code>, but sometimes this is what is NOT desired. In my case I have a fairly complex table and it relies on <code>border-collapse:separate</code> and would otherwise create quite a messy CSS/HTML soup.</p>
  
  <p>So what are other things that you might put in a table cell that would make IE draw the borders yet not be visible or copyable? For all other browsers the <code>empty-cells:show</code> already does the trick, so I really just need to fool IE.</p>