Hi, I am new to JSP. I am confused with the exercises solution, exercises 2 for chapter 2. I copied exactly same code from the exercise solutions,and I got error messages. After careful check with my typing, I found the <c:otherwise/> appears in the news.jsp, weather.jsp, and entertain.jsp. For my understanding, it should be worked as a pair:
<c:otherwise> </c:otherwise>. Could you please what is the different between <c:otherwise/> and <c:otherwise> </c:otherwise>.

Many Thanks!

Ann,

In XML it is possible for an element to have no content at all. Such an element is called an empty element. One way to denote an empty element is to merely leave out the content, e.g.

<center><c:otherwise></c:otherwise></center>

<div align="left">But as a shortcut, empty elements may also have a different syntax. Because there is no content to delimit, they may consist of a single empty-element tag. That looks like:</div id="left">

<center><c:otherwise/></center>

<div align="left">The slash at the end indicates that this is an empty-element tag, so there is no content or end-tag coming up. The slash is meant to be reminiscent of the slash in the end-tag of an element with both tags. This is just a shortcut syntax.</div id="left">




Neil Hainer