for bordered tables, you can visually see a cell is not displayed (ie no border around the cell) if it has no value. it looks ugly. the work around is usually assigning a space ‘ ’ to the cell in html code.

in css, you can show the cell with empty-cells property. valid values are show and hide.

CSS:

however, IE does not support this property! (surprise!?)

in php code, we can detect browser (via $_SERVER[’HTTP_USER_AGENT’]) to set sell value. if it’s MSIE, set the cell to ‘ ’.

just need to document this to remind myself why tables look ugly on IE.