[displaytag-user] IE doesn't apply stlyes to empty cells

[Adam M. <ad...@fo...>]

Has anyone else noticed that IE6 doesn't apply styles to empty <td>
tags? By empty, I mean a pair of <td>'s with only whitespace (or
nothing) in between. The character &nbsp; is not considered whitespace
in this case.

To correct this problem, I wrote a column decorator:
public class FixEmptyColumnDecorator implements
org.displaytag.decorator.ColumnDecorator {
    public String decorate(Object o) throws DecoratorException {
        if(o == null) {
            return "&nbsp;";
        }
        else return o.toString() + "&nbsp;";
    }
}

And I apply this decorator wherever empty cells may be generated. For
the most part it works fine...

BUT I'm using groupings in a table, and displaytag will generate
<td></td> for the column with repeated values AFTER any decorators are
applied. This screws up my styles under IE, and there doesn't seem to be
a way to work around the problem short of modifying the source for
displaytag. 

Can anyone think of a work-around? If not, any chance of modifying
displaytag codebase to return <td>&nbsp;</td> whenever it would
otherwise return an empty cell? I know this seems like a bogus request,
but unfortunately many of us have to support IE first and foremost in
our webapps, and it's big asthetic problem when styles aren't applied
consistently to a table. 

-- 
Adam Murray <ad...@fo...>
Fortify Software