Why are there any tags in JSP

Does anybody know why JSP pages use a CF tag like syntax for things like include files and forwards. Surely these could be accumplished in method calls inside <%%>'s.

It seams odd to use two different types of syntax.

Maybe somebody canshed some light on this?

Thanks,

we use tags to distribute our product to clients. we dont want a ton of hard coded stuff in the JSP pages. this allows them to change the look of the site to anything they want and use our tags (which return about 5000 different rows of data) where ever they want.

You can do it both ways using XML tags or "scriptlet"

<jsp:forward page="x.jsp"/>

or

<%pageContext.forward("x.jsp");%>

It depends on what you prefer. The idea of mixing XML tags and HTML tags is a nice idea but sometimes xml tags can require too much typing so I resort back to scriptlets. Coldfusion has the same ambiguity with CF tags and putting scripts in <CFSCRIPT>, though cfscript is a small subset of the Coldfusion tags.