Thanks for the replies, everyone.
After wrestling with facelets for several hours, I gave up.
I don't have time right now to fit yet another technology
into our already complex mix. Likewise, it is not the right
time for my project to migrate to JSF v1.2.
What I did discover is that you can use CDATA blocks inside
of the verbatim tags to tell XML parser to ignore the HTML tags.
Here's this solution:
<f:verbatim><![CDATA[
<div class="addItemTable">
<ul class="addItem">
<li>]]></f:verbatim><h:commandLink
action="#{globalOptionsMgr.addOption}"
value="#{messages['dhcp.ConfigureServerOptions.addOptionButton.Label']}"
/><f:verbatim><![CDATA[</li>
</ul>
</div>]]>
</f:verbatim>
Cheers,
Bryan