Bear B. asks why I am trying to do this. Answer: Just as part of teaching myself
Servlets & JSPs. I understand your point and might never use the XML syntax in practice, though the two books I am using -- Marty Hall and Larry Brown's Core Servlets and JavaServer Pages, Second Edition (see chapter 11 on XML syntax) and The
J2EE Tutorial, Second Edition (see chapter 13 on JavaServer Pages Documents) -- don't seem to find anything wrong with using it even in a non-auto-generated development environment. The Tutorial even suggests some advantages.
Sushma: In my original post I attempted to say that I had already tried the character entity 'ambersand lt ;' (which, as in your original reply, got translated into '<'!). The point was that when I do that, I get a syntax error (i.e., the XML parser now recognizes the validity of my <jsp:scriptlet>...</jsp:scriptlet> start and end tags, but the compiler compiling the
Java code between these tags chokes on the character entity, which of course is not valid Java syntax. So my problem remains unsolved. (Going back to Bear's point, I wonder what an auto-generator would do?)