Custom Tag won't display the attributes

Question

Quick summary: I can't refer to the attributes passed in to by custom tag.
I have a .jsf page that is passing two strings. One is from the backingBean and the other is hardcoded.
<%@page contentType="text/html"%>
<%@page pageEncoding="UTF-8"%>
<%@taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core"%>
<%@taglib prefix="h" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"%>
<%@taglib prefix="p" tagdir="/WEB-INF/tags"%>
<c:subview id="recommendedView">
     <h:dataTable id="recommendedlist" value="#{recommendedBean.recommendedList}" var="item" >
            <h:column >
               <c:facet name="header"><h:outputText value="Recommended"></h:outputText></c:facet>
               --<h:outputText value="#{item.title}"/>--
               <p:custom varid="${item.title}"  hardid="My Title"  />
            </h:column>
      </h:dataTable>
</c:subview>The --<h:outputText value="#{item.title}"/>-- shows that I do have a value when call this custom tag with item.title passed as varid.
Now the tag looks like this: custom.tag located in /WEB-INF/tags/
<%@tag description="put the tag description here" pageEncoding="UTF-8"%>
<%@attribute name="varid" required="true" %>
<%@attribute name="hardid" required="true" %>
<%@taglib prefix="f" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core"%>
<%@taglib prefix="h" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"%>
Test1: var<h:outputText id="test1" value="#{varid}" ></h:outputText>*<br>
Test2: hard<h:outputText id="test2" value="#{hardid}" ></h:outputText>*<br>
Test3: noOutputText-Var= ${varid}*<br>
Test4: noOutputText-Hard= ${hardid}*<br>I was told I needed to have an implicit.tld file and I read it also here (http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jluehe?entry=implicit_tag_libraries_require_and)
So here's my implicit.tld (also located under /WEB-INF/tags/
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<taglib version="2.1" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-jsptaglibrary_2_1.xsd">
  <tlib-version>2.1</tlib-version>
  <jspversion>2.1</jspversion>
  <short-name>Custom Tags</short-name>
</taglib>So the problem is when I refer varid - I get nothing (nothing writes out in either case using outputText or just ${varid}).
And when I refer to hardid, I get nothing for the outputText test but I do get something for the ${hardid} test.
I don't see this a reference to this problem alot on the web so I figure I must be missing something obvious but I just don't know what.
Does anyone have any ideas?
Thanks.
C

Answer 1

Are you using Windows Vista? If so and you have Aero turned on that sometimes causes strange things like that. It used to happen to me in Fireworks. The way I got around it was having it launch Fireworks in compatibility mode that would revert the display from Aero to standard.