Yep, it's true! If you want to re-render a table with AJAX and your table contains "empty" TDs with nbsp inside you will be surprised that something goes wrong. Well, what is nbsp and why is it so popular?

nbsp is the entity used to represent a non-breaking space. If you need to have an empty cell in a table you probably will used nbsp.

Fine, we know that it is just entity, it is defined in DTD!

However XMLHttpRequest object has no idea about DTD and as the result it cannot parse nbsp.

Answer: use unicode numeric character references of non-breaking space:   or