Max Katz wrote:
later JSF version's internal HTML generation does something that doesn't work well with your manual HTML.
What can it be? As long as components generate standards compliant HTML and the same is done by the developer manually, I don't see any problems.
The JSF renderers generate on-the-fly and their HTML output isn't always fixed. For example, some elements can render either <div> or <span>. The other JSF elements in the view can co-ordinate on this kind of stuff, but the raw HTML is static.
It gets worse when you use extensions such as IceFaces, Tomahawk or ADF, as these and other extension tagsets have their own set of CSS styles, often generated dynamically. Once again, the styles are co-ordinated with other elements, but not with static items.
Where you really get nailed, however, is when someone hits you up with a need to render to non-HTML, such as WAP. JSF can simply switch to a WAP renderkit, but the raw HTML will still output as raw HTML. Which can look really ugly on a display that doesn't understand HTML.