That reminds me of the old trick of using a 1x1 pixel in an empty table cell to ensure that internet explorer would actually expand the table cell to whatever width you set it to (height still needed another trick if i recall correctly).   would work, too, but then the minimum height of the cell would be whatever the line height was set to, and the line-height property didn't behave the same across browsers.

It's funny how old tricks make a comeback. I see a lot of  's in React codebases to preserve whitespace around JSX tags.