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POAre we supposed to be able to trust empty DIVs to show in HTML5?
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copied!<p>Having seen advice seemingly change over the years regarding use of empty DIVs (ie. <code><DIV CLASS="somediv"></DIV></code>) I'm confused as to the current thinking over whether or not to use <code>&nbsp;</code> when a DIV will have no inner HTML.</p> <p>I can find no definitive confirmation over whether we can rely on all modern browsers to display background color and image correctly at the specified width & height when there is no inner HTML, so I'm thinking maybe we can't rely on it - yet it's such a seemingly basic area.</p> <p>I have even seen suggestions that empty DIVs should never be used - but do specs really state it is 'wrong' to have empty DIVs, or is it just unreliable? (I've tried finding reference to them, but maybe I'm using the wrong terms).</p> <p>To illustrate, here are 5 areas where I would normally use an empty DIV, in the absence of any recommended alternative:</p> <ol> <li>as a placeholder for content which will subsequently be fetched by XHR calls</li> <li>as a way to manually create space in a layout</li> <li>where an image is defined in CSS (as a background image, but will effectively be foreground)</li> <li>where the text will come from the CSS using <code>.somediv:after{content:SOMETEXT}</code></li> <li>where CSS is used to display graph bars etc using solid background color</li> </ol> <p>Maybe there are different answers for each of these, which might explain the complexity over this issue.</p> <p>I have, of course, tried discovering already, but for example the SO question <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/198058/is-necessary-to-show-an-empty-div">Is necessary to show an empty <div>?</a> suggests to me there is a huge amount of "IMHO", "probably", "seems to work" in this area. I would expect that by now that some official consensus has been reached on best practice.</p> <p>So.. should I use <code>&nbsp;</code> and if so should I set font-size to the same as the smaller of DIV width/height to ensure that space is filled in all browsers? Are there any other CSS tricks to ensure this will work in all browsers?</p>

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