The J2EE™ Tutorial Second Edition

Defining the Custom Component Tag in a Tag Library Descriptor

To define a tag, you declare it in a TLD. The Web container uses the TLD to validate the tag. The set of tags that are part of the HTML render kit are defined in the html_basic TLD.

The custom tags area and map are defined in bookstore.tld. The bookstore.tld file defines tags for all the custom components and the custom validator tag described in Creating a Custom Tag (page 753).

All tag definitions must be nested inside the taglib element in the TLD. Each tag is defined by a tag element. Here is part of the tag definition of the map tag:

 <tag> <name>map</name> <tag-class>taglib.MapTag</tag-class> <attribute> <name>binding</name> <required>false</required> <rtexprvalue>false</rtexprvalue> ...