> As I have already, l had tried " ". But it was not working. 
> BEcause that iserts white space in the output text. and all 
> browser are intelligent enough to remove the border incase 
> there is no text found in TD element.
> 
> FYI, stuff that worked for me is:
> <xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">&amp;nbsp;</xsl:text>
> And this inserts &nbsp; in the output. 
> 

If there is a difference in the way the browser displays a
non-breaking-space versus the way it displays the HTML entity reference & n
b s p ; then there is something badly broken in your system, and you should
find out what it is rather than circumventing the problem at the XSLT level.

Michael Kay