thanks for the replies, and apologies for the code excerpt. I had done some googling and had gotten the idea that this may not work, but thanks for confirming.
What I'm trying to do, is to take all the values of the form and pass to a
java bean. I had hoped to code the values as xml with javascript, but I think it would be better to have the java bean do the xml coding server side.
My thinking (apparently incorrect) re: the mulitple requets was that a) the user clicks the link to the form jsp page, and it loads. b) the user fills in all the values, and c) when the user clicks submit, the javascript would be invoked, thus sending the coded
string to the server as a param.
But that's not how it works, I guess. Anyway, thanks for pointing out the need for jstl, I'll definitely read up on that.
bp