Creating Static Content

You create static content in a JSP page simply by writing it as if you were creating a page that consisted only of that content. Static content can be expressed in any text-based format, such as HTML, Wireless Markup Language (WML), and XML. The default format is HTML. If you want to use a format other than HTML, at the beginning of your JSP page you include a page directive with the contentType attribute set to the content type. The purpose of the contentType directive is to allow the browser to correctly interpret the resulting content. So if you wanted a page to contain data expressed in WML, you would include the following directive:

<%@ page contentType="text/vnd.wap.wml"%>

A registry of content type names is kept by the IANA at http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/.

Response and Page Encoding

You also use the contentType attribute to specify the encoding of the response. For example, the date application specifies that the page should be encoded using UTF-8, an encoding that supports almost all locales, using the following page directive:

<%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8" %>

If the response encoding weren’t set, the localized dates would not be rendered correctly.

To set the source encoding of the page itself, you would use the following page directive:

<%@ page pageEncoding="UTF-8" %>

You can also set the page encoding of a set of JSP pages. The value of the page encoding varies depending on the configuration specified in the JSP configuration section of the web application deployment descriptor (see Declaring Page Encodings).