Animesh,



At 03:44 AM 5/3/2004, you wrote:
Quoted from some Site:

Empty cells in tables often cause problems to HTML authors, especially 
since browsers often display such cells without border even if the other 
cells have borders. There is an often-mentioned trick to solve that 
problem: put   into an empty cell.

What Some Site isn't telling you is why this works.



It works because "&_nbsp;" (no underscore) is a general entity in HTML, 
which represents a particular Unicode character, the non-breaking space, 
which combines two necessary features. First, since it is not a regular 
whitespace character (in HTML these are the carriage return, the tab and 
the regular space characters), it is not "munged" or collapsed in the 
display. This is what accounts for the border on a table cell in which this 
character appears alone. (If you have only a plain space, your border 
doesn't appear, which is why there's a problem in the first place.) But 
just as importantly, unlike other characters that count as non-whitespace 
content, this character *looks like* space.



This character can be represented straightforwardly in XML using a Unicode 
character reference for its code point: &_#xA0; (if you like hexadecimal 
numbering) or &_#160; (if you prefer decimal numbering) -- both times with 
no underscore character in there (if I type them properly at least some 
people's mailers will say "oh a non-breaking space", and display them as 
spaces).



Going by above quotation I tried getting   in the output. And I got 
that using using <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">&amp;nbsp;</xsl:text>.

But again another problem pop up because output generated is Not a 
well-formed XML as & get inserted in the output. And I cann't attach More 
XSL to the output generated.

You can use the &_nbsp; general entity in well-formed XML if you declare it 
(you would provide a declaration to tell your system that when you say 
"&_nbsp;" you mean "&_#160;"), but XSLT 1.0 has no provision for providing 
such declarations in output.



May be I have to find some alternative solution for the above problem.

The alternative solution would be simply to use the straight character 
reference instead of the general entity. That is -- as has been suggested 
-- you use &_#160; instead of the error-prone workaround using 
disable-output-escaping.



Many of us do this routinely, so we know it works. Anyone who tells us that 
it doesn't has a little explaining to do. If & # 1 6 0 ; doesn't work for 
you, you're doing something else wrong, or your situation is different from 
the general case in some important but unspecified way.



I hope that helps,
Wendell






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Wendell Piez                            mailto:wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                http://www.mulberrytech.com
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