I have never been a fan of JavaServer Pages (JSP) but I have used them on a few projects. When JSP Documents (JSPs with XML syntax) were added in version 1.2 I thought if you had to do JSP then JSP Documents were the way to go. I prefer the uniform XML syntax to all the crazy syntax in JSP Pages. <\/p>\n
Recently I’ve been focused on producing valid HTML. Perhaps too focused. A while back I bought into the XHTML is the wave of the future so we should all start using XHTML now hype. Now I see that serving good old HTML 4.01 is the best choice. See Sending XHTML as text\/html Considered Harmful<\/a> for why. My old habit of using XML style empty elements such as <br \/> was getting me into trouble with HTML validators. The HTML Validator Firefox extension (using Tidy) will flag the slash in red even though it doesn’t give a written error. The W3C validator gives an error if the \/> results in character data where it isn’t allowed. This can happen on the empty meta tag. <\/p>\n After reading about empty elements<\/a> and what <br \/> really means in HTML I wondered how is it even possible for a JSP Document to generate valid HTML.<\/p>\n Because JSP Documents must be valid XML an empty tag like meta must end with \/> (or <\/meta> which doesn’t help) and this results in a validation error because character data is not allowed within the head tag.<\/p>\n This really surprised me. I looked and looked for a way to tell the JSP Document to output valid HTML but couldn’t find one. If you know of a way please tell me. The jsp:output action gives you control over the DOCTYPE and XML declaration. I was expecting it to also let you specify that the output method is HTML just like XSLT does<\/a>. But it doesn’t.<\/p>\n Unless I’m missing something obvious JSP Documents should come with a warning – “Warning JSP Documents don’t output valid HTML by default”. I wonder why the oversight. Did the JSP designers buy into the XHTML hype as well?<\/p>\n There are two ways I know of to work around this issue. One is to use a CDATA section. For example: <\/p>\n\r\n <head>\r\n <![CDATA[<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text\/html\">]]>\r\n ...\r\n<\/pre>\n