Is it suggested to use h:outputText for everything?

Question

I'm new to JSF (just started learning about it 4 days ago) and I'm a bit confused about the usage of h:outputText. I know that is a simple tag, but in most examples I've seen, it's used to output very simple (no need to escape), non-i18n text. For example (taken from here)

<h:outputText value="Transport" /> 

which could be replaced by

Transport  

So, I'm wondering if I'm missing something or if most of the examples I've seen are overcomplicated to the point of insanity.

Answer 1

If you're using JSF 2.x with Facelets 2.x instead of JSP, then both are equally valid. Even more, Facelets implicitly wraps inline content in a component as represented by <h:outputText> (in other words, it will be escaped!).

Only whenever you'd like to disable escaping using escape="false", or would like to assign id, style, onclick, etc programmatically, or would like to use a converter (either explicit via converter or implicit via forClass), then you need <h:outputText>.

I myself don't use <h:outputText> whenever it is not necessary. Without it, the source code becomes better readable. You can just inline EL in template text like so #{bean.text} instead of doing <h:outputText value="#{bean.text}">. Before JSF 2.0, in JSP and Facelets 1.x, this was not possible and thus the <h:outputText> is mandatory. If your IDE gives warnings on this, it's most likely JSF 1.x configured/minded.