According to the JSP 1.1 specs, the description of the <taglib-uri> setting can be a short name. In both the Sun spec and in WebLogic docs, they give examples of using short names, such as "myPRlibrary" (in the JSP 1.1 specs) and "myTLD" (in WebLogic docs). And, Hans uses "/orataglibs" (or something similar) for the tags in his book. Sometimes, shortened names have a forward-slash in front of them, other times they don't. And, yes, I've read the specs and the errata, and Hans' book. What I'm surprised at is the amount of disagreement, or at least confusion. I'm finding about the right approach is on such a seemingly simple topic. A taglib URI can be a URL (such as, Jakarta's approach, "http://jakarta.apache.org/taglibs/<tagLibName>") or a relative URL (I've seen many using "/WEB-INF/tlds/<taglibname>.tld"), or even a short symbolic name (like "TagLib"). But, here's what I don't get -- most of the time, when a URL is used, it doesn't actually point to any file at the specified address. Instead, it's only purpose seems to be as a way to help guarantee a unique name -- it really doesn't matter what it is (it's only the unique combination of characters that matter). So, if this is the real purpose, as a way to create a unique name -- essentially a symbolic name, then a shortened name makes more sense to me, if it seems to be unique. The "URL (but not actually a real URL)" approach is clever in some regards, but introduces misconceptions to naive users about what it represents. Today, someone at work told me that they thought that if he was using a laptop that wasn't connected to the Internet, they wouldn't be able to access this file, so therefore they thought the taglib directive would fail. As a result, I'm arguing that a symbolic name that is unique, such as myUniqueNameTLD or something like that, is possibly the best approach. I've even joked that using a URL (with your company name in it) may be more likely a problem than a short name (and less flexible) in that a company might get acquired, and the acquiring company could end up insisting that the URI be changed.
So, I'm interested in hearing some opinions about why the URL approach won in your designs -- was it just that it seemed what everyone else was doing? Or, do some application servers cannot handle shortnames? Or, why did you pick a shortname -- weren't you worried about the uniqueness issue? Steve =========================================================================== To unsubscribe: mailto [EMAIL PROTECTED] with body: "signoff JSP-INTEREST". For digest: mailto [EMAIL PROTECTED] with body: "set JSP-INTEREST DIGEST". Some relevant FAQs on JSP/Servlets can be found at: http://archives.java.sun.com/jsp-interest.html http://java.sun.com/products/jsp/faq.html http://www.esperanto.org.nz/jsp/jspfaq.jsp http://www.jguru.com/faq/index.jsp http://www.jspinsider.com
