Output html inside command link

Hi,

I am facing a small issue...

I have installed JBOSS 7.1 and can't get Richfaces to work inside the application....

I have a php website that I am converting, where the website's navigations is performed on a horizontal menu generated by html that looks like

Styles are then applied to this html structure.
My problem is that I want to have JSF action's invoked when a menu item link is clicked so I tried to produce the html above....Unfortunately it is not possible to nest a span inside of an <h:commandLink> ... I receive the error :

The value of attribute "value" associated with an element type "h:commandLink" must not contain the '<' character.

As I am not a designer, recoding the CSS is not an option.... so I am left with 2 choices :

1. Figure out how to get JSF to render a span inside of the commandLink
2. Find a JSF component that can render a horizontal menu that I can run in JBOSS 7.1 without any issues....

Suggestions...please?

Well, considering that the formal name of the product is "JBoss RichFaces", you certainly should be able to use RichFaces - and its menu tags - in your webapp.

Although, ironically, I had some words for one of the JBoss people not long ago about the advisability of mixing raw HTML and JSF together. I don't recommend it myself, since JSF is an abstract media-independent system and HTML is not. And JBoss 4 eliminated certain features of JBoss 3 that allowed be to avoid "brute-force" HTML, so Smeagol's not happy.

One question: Why do you consider a "span" element to be essential to your link? Typically spans are used to bracket content for the purpose of applying a style to them. As far as it goes, the h:outputText will do that - it generates a span and uses the style and styleClass attributes to set the span's style. However, the commandLink control obtains its value from its "value=" attribute, not body text. And the style(s) of that text will be taken from the commandLink's styleClass and style attributes.