Thanks for the reply Chris!
I am using the <jsp:include> tag. I guess I didn't realize (until now) what the meaning of translation unit was, and why the spec would not allow multiple @page attributes. Since the generated code for an included file (i.e <jsp:include>
is actually another servlet there is no problem with having a duplicate @page attribute. If I change to an <%@include> tag then only one servlet is generated, and I get an error like I would expect:
"Page directive: can't have multiple occurrences of contentType"
So the end result is that I can safely set the contentType attribute in both JSPs since they are in separate translation units.
Thanks again,
Erick