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In JSP XML syntax, Koert asks...

Isn't it odd that this is so badly documented?

Fair comment. It's documented in the JSP specification, but you won't find much else about it on the web or in books. From my perspective, the reason for this is that nobody actually uses it. Okay, that's a bit of a generalization, but it's mostly true. The XML view of a JSP page is designed to be used programmatically by tools and not to be read/written by humans.

The great thing about the XML view is that it's well-formed XML, which you can parse and transform as necessary. Of course, the major problem is that it's verbose and pretty unreadable. Interestingly, the XML view of a JSP 2.x page can be more readable than its JSP 1.x counterpart. The reason for this is that you have the option to use the integrated expression language support instead of using a mixture of custom tags and runtime expressions translated into their XML equivalents. Still, *I* wouldn't want to actually develop JSP pages in this format and I don't actually remember anybody else using it either! ;-)