Swapping a wicket rendered tag for an alternate tag or text

[Michael Brinkman]

My apologies if this has been answered a thousand times before but I haven't
been able to find anything in searching, so your thoughts would be
appreciated.

I have a very simple scenario where I have an anchor tag associated with a
wicket link that wraps a static image like this:

<a wicket:id="myLink">Link Text</a>

In some cases, I would like to swap this anchor tag and it's body with a
&nbsp; since it's in a table.  So I've used setEnabled(false) on the
associated Link instance to cause the anchor tag to be swapped with a span
and then I overrode the onComponentTagBody method on the Link like so:

                protected void onComponentTagBody(MarkupStream markupStream,
ComponentTag openTag)
                {
                    //    Only render the body if the link is enabled
                    if (this.isEnabled())
                    {
                        super.onComponentTagBody(markupStream, openTag);
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        //    Write out a space and then move to the
matching close tag of the original link.  Even though
                        //    the open tag has been renamed to "span" by
being disabled, the framework will take care of renaming the
                        //    close tag as well.
                        getResponse().write("&nbsp;");
                        markupStream.skipToMatchingCloseTag(openTag);
                    }
                }

So what comes out is a little more verbose than just a non breaking space:

<span>&nbsp;</span>

Any thoughts on a better approach to this would be appreciated. I'm really
interested in this because I find it to be a generally useful thing to know
how to do and I suspect there's probably already a simpler way to swap a
wicket rendered tag for something else that I just don't know about.

Thanks,

-Michael