Question

In trying to clean up some pretty crufty code I rewrote something this way:

<jsp:element name="img">
    <jsp:attribute name="src">
        <c:url value="${akamai}/images/prdLargerImage.gif"/>
    </jsp:attribute>
    <jsp:attribute name="alt">Zoom Image</jsp:attribute>
</jsp:element>

…but was surprised to discover that JSP generated this code:

<img src="/images/prdLargerImage.gif" alt="Zoom Image">


            </img>

Is there any way to force it to generate <img src="/images/prdLargerImage.gif" alt="Zoom Image"/>?

Answer 1

You can configure the container to trim that whitespace away by the following entry in web.xml:

<jsp-config>
    <jsp-property-group>
        <url-pattern>*.jsp</url-pattern>
        <trim-directive-whitespaces>true</trim-directive-whitespaces>
    </jsp-property-group>
</jsp-config>

There’s nothing you can do against having a dangling </img> instead of a short tag <img/>.

However, if you target a Servlet 2.4 / JSP 2.0 compatible container (where EL in template text is supported), I’d rather just rewrite that piece of ugliness (which offers imo totally no extra advantages) like follows:

<img src="${akamai}/images/prdLargerImage.gif" alt="Zoom Image" />