Internet Explorer not rendering empty div correctly

Internet Explorer won’t render empty divs correctly.

I had a div with a height and a background image but no content; It was not rendered with the correct height it was only like one line.

A work around for this is to have some “content” inside the div (like a whitespace, a comment or why not both) then Internet Explorer renders the correct height.

<div class="some-class-with-size-and-background">
&nbsp;<!-- keep to get IE to render this div -->
</div>