Non-breaking non-space in HTML

Question

I have a bowling web application that allows pretty detailed frame-by-frame information entry. One thing it allows is tracking which pins were knocked down on each ball. To display this information, I make it look like a rack of pins:

o o o o
 o o o
  o o
   o

Images are used to represent the pins. So, for the back row, I have four img tags, then a br tag. It works great... mostly. The problem is in small browsers, such as IEMobile. In this case, where there are may 10 or 11 columns in a table, and there may be a rack of pins in each column, Internet Explorer will try to shrink the column size to fit on the screen, and I end up with something like this:

o o o
  o
o o o
 o o
  o

or

o o
o o
o o
 o
o o
 o

The structure is:

<tr>
    <td>
        <!-- some whitespace -->
        <div class="..."><img .../><img .../><img .../><img .../><br/>...</div>
        <!-- some whitespace -->
    </td>
</tr>

There is no whitespace inside the inner div. If you look at this page in a regular browser, it should display fine. If you look at it in IEMobile, it does not.

Any hints or suggestions? Maybe some sort of   that doesn't actually add a space?

---

Follow-up/Summary

I have received and tried several good suggestions, including:

• Dynamically generate the whole image on the server. It is a good solution, but doesn't really fit my need (hosted on GAE), and a bit more code than I'd like to write. These images could also be cached after the first generation.
• Use CSS white-space declaration. It is a good standards-based solution, but it fails miserably in the IEMobile view.

What I ended up doing

*hangs head and mumbles something*

Yes, that's right, a transparent GIF at the top of the div, sized to the width I need. End code (simplified) looks like:

<table class="game">
    <tr class="analysis leave">
        <!-- ... -->
        <td> <div class="smallpins"><img class="spacer" src="http://seasrc.th.net/gif/cleardot.gif" /><br/><img src="/img/pinsmall.gif"/><img src="/img/nopinsmall.gif"/><img src="/img/nopinsmall.gif"/><img src="/img/nopinsmall.gif"/><br/><img src="/img/pinsmall.gif"/><img src="/img/pinsmall.gif"/><img src="/img/nopinsmall.gif"/><br/><img src="/img/nopinsmall.gif"/><img src="/img/nopinsmall.gif"/><br/><img src="/img/nopinsmall.gif"/></div> </td>
        <!-- ... -->
    </tr>
</table>

And CSS:

div.smallpins {
    background: url(/img/lane.gif) repeat;
    text-align: center;
    padding: 0;
    white-space: nowrap;
}
div.smallpins img {
    width: 1em;
    height: 1em;
}
div.smallpins img.spacer {
    width: 4.5em;
    height: 0px;
}
table.game tr.leave td{
    padding: 0;
    margin: 0;
}
table.game tr.leave .smallpins {
    min-width: 4em;
    white-space: nowrap;
    background: none;
}

P.S.: No, I will not be hotlinking someone else's clear dot in my final solution :)

Answer 1

You could try the css "nowrap" option in the containing div.

{white-space: nowrap;}

Not sure how widely that is supported.

Answer 2

I've got around this type of issue in the past by dynamically creating the entire image (with appropriate pin arrangement) as a single image. If you are using ASP.NET, this is pretty easy to do with GDI calls. You just dynamically create the image with pin placement, then serve to the page as a single image. Takes all the alignment issues out of the picture (pun intended).

Answer 3

Why not have an image for all possible outcomes for the pins? No Messing with layouts for browsers an image is an image

Generate them on the fly caching the created images for reuse.