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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-17T09:23:51+00:00

I am new to Java and Spring. I encountered the error trying to apply

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I am new to Java and Spring. I encountered the error trying to apply CSS styles.
Here is my jsp:

<jsp:root version="1.2" xmlns:jsp="http://java.sun.com/JSP/Page"
xmlns:display="urn:jsptld:http://displaytag.sf.net"
xmlns:c="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core"
xmlns:spring="http://www.springframework.org/tags">
<jsp:directive.page contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<jsp:directive.page import="test1.domain.*" />

<html>
<head>
<title>CD Catalog</title>
<link href='<c:url value="/css/displaytag.css" />' rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
</head>
and so on...

The css folder is on the same level where WEB-INF is.

In my servlet.xml I have:

<mvc:resources mapping="/**" location="/*" />

The next error I get:

HTTP Status 500 – /WEB-INF/jsp/test_task.jsp(11,15) The value of attribute “href” associated with an element type “null” must not contain the ‘<‘ character.

I tried also single and double quotes the other way round, and tried the same double quotes, but it wasn’t successful.

I would appreciate any advice.
Thank you in advance.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Please add tag library declaration<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" prefix="c" %> to the header. The taglib directive declares that your JSP page uses a set of custom tags(c:url here), and identifies the location of the library. Without that indication, your JSP file will end up with a (href) attribute containing an unescaped < character, which is not a valid XML.

    UPDATE:

    Just realize you are using JSP document instead of JSP page, and you’ve already declared namespace xmlns:c, so taglib isn’t needed any more. Since JSP document strictly requires well-formed XML document, it complains about your link’s href attribute(with unescaped < inside). To avoid that, try:

    <c:url var="url" value="/css/displaytag.css" />
<link href="${url}" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
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