You are trying to fix the problem the wrong way - the 1990s way. Browsers typically do not show table cells that do not have content. So the 1990s solution was to insert "invisible" content, like the non-breaking space  . The correct and clean way to make empty table cells visible is to use CSS: empty-cells:show. To get an exception from that rule, i.e. standard behaviour, you would use empty-cells:hide.

Alexander