When an attribute value is really big

Imagine you have a tag attribute that might be as long as, say, a paragraph. Sticking that in the opening tag could get ugly. So, you can choose to put content in the body of the tag, and then use that as a kind of attribute.

This time we’ll take the subTitle attribute out of the tag, and instead make it the body of the <myTags:Header> tag.

image with no caption

Note

We no longer need the attribute directive!

Inside the Tag File (Header.tag)

image with no caption

Inside the JSP that uses the tag

<%@ taglib prefix="myTags" tagdir="/WEB-INF/tags" %>
<html><body>

<myTags:Header>
   We take the sting out of SOAP. OK, so it's not Jini,<br>
   but we'll help you get through it with the least<br>
   frustration and hair loss.
</myTags:Header>

Note

Now we just give the tag a body, instead of putting all this as the value of an attribute in the opening tag.

<br>
Contact us at: ${initParam.mainEmail}
</body></html>

But we’re back to the same problem we had before—without a TLD, where do you declare the body-content type?

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