forcing non breaking spaces?

I have a rather large xsl document Full of tablular data. Of course,
empty cells don't show up when there is nothing in them so a common
trick is simply to put a space there.

Is there some more elegant way of making sure a space gets added after
every value so that, if there is no value associated with it, there is
still a space?

More elegant than going
<xsl:text disable-output-escaping="yes">&amp;#160;</xsl:text> crazy, that is.