Force somthing invisble into table cell

jacob · October 30th, 2005, 02:42 PM

Well, I have a slight blemish in a piece of HTML which I use for an ASP.NET control. The problem is that a table cell is constructed with borders to hold a javascript menu, which is placed in a span.

When the control is rendered the browser doesn't recognize that the table cell holds anything why the browser dosen't draw the borders (both IE and Firefox); i.e. the table cell has to have content in order to make the borders visible.

Therefore a tried to put in a   or anything else to force some non-visible content into the cell. This works fine in IE, but in Firefox the menu is pushed. The code underneath demonstrate the problem...

Code:

<table>
<tr>
    <td style="border:solid 1px #000000; background-color:#eeeeee;"></td>
    <td style="border:solid 1px #000000; background-color:#eeeeee;">&nbsp</td>
    <td style="border:solid 1px #000000; background-color:#eeeeee;">1</td>
</tr>
</table>

Only borders on the last two cells will appear. And I want borders on all three. This is probably a well-known problem, but someone must have solved it.

Is there a way to tell a table cell that it should draw the border eventhough there are no content?

Thanks, Jacob.

jacob · October 30th, 2005, 03:00 PM

Found a solution, but is there another more correct method? The solution I found is shown in the code below, where the tag for a line is used...

Code:

<table>
<tr>
    <td style="border:solid 1px #000000; background-color:#eeeeee;"></td>
    <td style="border:solid 1px #000000; background-color:#eeeeee;">&nbsp</td>
    <td style="border:solid 1px #000000; background-color:#eeeeee;">1</td>
</tr>
</table>

The problem is that the color attribute has to be set according to the background color of the cell, table or page. Hope there is another way to do this.

Thanks, Jacob.