Sorry, we don't care HOW recent the tutorial is. Scriptlets infringe on the Separation of Concerns afforded under Model/View/Controller (MVC). In more practical terms, they're royal pain in the rear to debug and maintain and they make reading the template HTML harder as well. We've moved beyond using JSPs as though they were ASPs these days. This kind of stuff works for quick-and-dirty, but
J2EE is an expensive platform to set up and run, and if fast, cheap and sloppy is the driving criteria, I recommend something like PHP, instead. Saves time and effort all the way around. J2EE is for when security, scalability and rigour are worth the extra cost.
I cannot actually see anything wrong with your example, but scriptlets are also a strain on the IDE's parsers as the lexical scanner is having to pop back and forth between 2 wildly different syntax forms: HTML and Java code. On top of that, straight HTML isn't an entirely sane notation to begin with (which is why xhtml was invented). Top it all off with the fact that the Eclipse XML parsers never seem to be 100% trustworthy themselves and the net effect may be that you're simply getting a bogus error message.
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.