Option to have regions who stay on the same place in a responsive layout.

In the set up of my project I require regions to stay in their place, whether they contain content or not.

For example:

Region A - Region B - region C

I just want to add content in region B.
In the current setup Region B would float entirely to the left and would take the spot of region A.
What my set up requires is for region B to stick in the middle with the empty regions A and C alongside it.
This is quite simple but requires change in our code.

First of all, all regions need to be rendered regardless of content, this can be done in the function theme_layout_responsive(). Second, we need to adapt the CSS so empty Divs are not ignored. (for example with a min-height:1)

For my project I will create a quick patch for the first one, optimally this option should be configurable.