If you're trying to display a text box with no value using XSL and the text box is collapsing, causing your HTML to be parsed incorrectly by a browser, set your HTML output method in your XSL file to HTML as explained here:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output method="html"/>
...
</xsl:stylesheet>
