On Tue, 17 Sep 2002, Erik Beijnoff wrote:
> But then when it should be printed... The page variable myUrl is
> printed in the <a/> elements href attribute with href=’<c:out
> value="${myUrl}"/>’!?!?
>
> I mean this isn't even correct xml in any way. Even if the <c:out>
> would have been just plain text, which it isn't, it still quite ugly.
> But it's even worse, as far as I know "<" isn't even allowed in an
> attribute, even less so trying to nest an xml document element
> hierarchy within it!
Indeed, the syntax isn't valid XML. However, documents that produce web
pages -- or even XML documents -- need not be authored in XML. If you're
comfortable with the syntax and don't need to parse the input document,
there's nothing wrong with
<a href="<c:out value="${myUrl}"/>"/>
This turns into
<a href="http:///."; />
at request-time, so all the client sees is valid HTML (or XML if that's
how you've written your page).
Still, the syntax is indeed awkward. There are a number of potential
solutions:
* You can author an JSP page in the XML syntax and use CDATA to indicate
that "<a href=" and "/>" are simply text.
* In JSP 2.0, you'll be able to write
<a href="${myUrl}" />
which is valid XML.
* In JSP 2.0, you'll also be able to construct the <a> element manually
using tags in the "jsp" namespace, much as you'd do in XSLT.
As an side, note that you should really output URLs with <c:url>, not
<c:out> -- but that doesn't address the syntax you're pointing out.
> So what I'm asking is this: is there any other (better) way to perform
> this action, perhaps with a tag <myTag:hyperLink value="${myUrl}"/> or
> something like that. But shouldn't this really have been in the spec?
> Any opinions?
We really couldn't have added this to JSTL, since one of the goals was to
avoid tying JSTL to HTML in particular. Instead, we adopted a longer-term
view, realizing that the problems would be fixed automatically under JSP
2.0. To put it another way, this is really a JSP issue, not a JSTL issue,
and it's fixed in the upcoming version of JSP.
Thanks for the great comments about JSTL! It's great to hear you're
finding the spec useful. Best,
--
Shawn Bayern
JSTL reference-implementation lead
"JSTL in Action" http://www.jstlbook.com
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