title: Is there a character entity that means nothing at all?
body: <p>I'm trying to use markup to create a Text node in an html document which does not affect the presentation and has no semantic meaning in order to get the <a href="https://devdocs.io/css/:empty" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><code>:empty</code></a> pseudo-class to trigger.</p>
  
  <p>Here's the code (<a href="https://stackoverflow.com/a/54084468/712334">copied from here</a>):</p>
  
  <p><div class="snippet" data-lang="js" data-hide="false" data-console="true" data-babel="false">
  <div class="snippet-code">
  <pre class="snippet-code-css lang-css prettyprint-override"><code>th::after { content: attr(data-value) }
  td::after { content: attr(data-value) }
  td[data-value]:not(:empty) {
    color: fuchsia;
  }</code></pre>
  <pre class="snippet-code-html lang-html prettyprint-override"><code>&lt;table&gt;
    &lt;tr&gt;
      &lt;th data-value="Peter"&gt;&lt;/th&gt;
      &lt;td data-value="male"&gt;&amp;#x0200B;&lt;/td&gt;
      &lt;td data-value="34"&gt;&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;/tr&gt;
    &lt;tr&gt;
      &lt;th data-value="Susanne"&gt;&lt;/th&gt;
      &lt;td data-value="female"&gt;&lt;/td&gt;
      &lt;td data-value="12"&gt;&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;/tr&gt;
    &lt;tr&gt;
      &lt;th data-value="Lucas"&gt;&lt;/th&gt;
      &lt;td data-value="male"&gt;&amp;#x0200B;&lt;/td&gt;
      &lt;td data-value="41"&gt;&lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;/tr&gt;
  &lt;/table&gt;</code></pre>
  </div>
  </div>
  </p>
  
  <p>After reviewing the <a href="https://dev.w3.org/html5/html-author/charref" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Character Entity Reference Chart</a> it's unclear to me if the <code>ZeroWidthSpace</code> would be suitable for this purpose:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;td&gt;&amp;ZeroWidthSpace;&lt;/td&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Is there a way to use html markup to create Text nodes without any semantic meaning?</p>