title: What's the best way to represent an empty TH in HTML5?
body: <p>Say I have the given table:</p>
  
  <pre><code>       +------+------+------+
         | Col1 | Col2 | Col3 |
  +------+------+------+------+
  | Row1 | D1.1 | D1.2 | D1.3 |
  +------+------+------+------+
  | Row2 | D2.1 | D2.2 | D2.3 |
  +------+------+------+------+
  | Row3 | D3.1 | D3.2 | D3.3 |
  +------+------+------+------+
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And I want to represent it in HTML5. The tricky thing is that tables like this must be semantically important, but the top-left cell is <em>not</em> semantically important, but instead a spacer to line up the more important column headers. What's the best way to do this? My first idea is to do it like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;table&gt;
      &lt;thead&gt;
          &lt;tr&gt;
              &lt;th&gt;&lt;/th&gt;
              &lt;th&gt;Col1&lt;/th&gt;
              &lt;th&gt;Col2&lt;/th&gt;
              &lt;th&gt;Col3&lt;/th&gt;
          &lt;/tr&gt;
      &lt;/thead&gt;
      &lt;tbody&gt;
          &lt;tr&gt;
              &lt;th&gt;Row1&lt;/th&gt;
              &lt;td&gt;D1.1&lt;/td&gt;
              &lt;td&gt;D1.2&lt;/td&gt;
              &lt;td&gt;D1.3&lt;/td&gt;
          &lt;/tr&gt;
          &lt;tr&gt;
              &lt;th&gt;Row2&lt;/th&gt;
              &lt;td&gt;D2.1&lt;/td&gt;
              &lt;td&gt;D2.2&lt;/td&gt;
              &lt;td&gt;D2.3&lt;/td&gt;
          &lt;/tr&gt;
          &lt;tr&gt;
              &lt;th&gt;Row3&lt;/th&gt;
              &lt;td&gt;D3.1&lt;/td&gt;
              &lt;td&gt;D3.2&lt;/td&gt;
              &lt;td&gt;D3.3&lt;/td&gt;
          &lt;/tr&gt;
      &lt;/tbody&gt;
  &lt;/table&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Though, putting <code>&lt;th&gt;&lt;/th&gt;</code> in there feels just wrong, like using <code>&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;</code> for spacing. <strong>Is there a better way to do this?</strong></p>