Just thought I'd post a quick blog about an epiphany I had... For a long time now, I've been aggravated by the IE rendering engine (for many things) and it's inability to understand the empty-cells CSS directive to display and style empty table cells.

This has proved less important over the years since tables have been virtually eliminated from properly coded webistes, however it's important to note that there IS a time and a place for table drawn data. When this is the case, it can be a difficult prospect to perfect your layout when IE insists on not styling empty cells. It's downright foolish.

Well, once again, JQuery to the rescue! I've used Dojo a bit, and perused Yui and some other Javascript frameworks, but thus far JQuery has been the simplest to implement with the least amount of overhead. Case and point you ask? Take this code sample that will quickly and efficiently put content into all of your empty Table Cells, thereby making Internet Explorer (and any other browser that doesn't want to adhere to standards) properly style the cells:

$(document).ready(function() { $("td:empty").html(" "); });

This will put a non-breaking space in any empty Table Cell in the DOM, and then your cells will be properly styled. This will have no effect in other browsers that already understand the empty-cells CSS directive, as it essentially overrides it with non-semantic code; Code that even goes un-noticed by search engines since it's rendered in JavaScript!

Hope this helps someone else along the way!