I don't understand, is your JSF app trying to parse the HTC file for some reason? I've never heard of anybody needing to do that. It should just be a statically served resource, like an image.

I honestly don't know if those things would have any side effects. I suspect not, but I have no basis for that other than the experience you've related. I don't think I've ever come across another htc file that did those things, but that doesn't mean much.

Well, I was really just putting this out there for anyone else with a similar experience. I don't have other experience with htc files in other deployment environments, but it did strike me that the w3c page for HTML Components shows every example wrapped in an HTML tagset with xml namespacing for PUBLIC - that seems to be a default recommendation. As for using CDATA tags, the need really depends on how you're serving your pages, so it might be note to end-users, but not something to include by default. Thanks.

Now in a JSF2 environment, and HTC files simply don't work with my stack in anything prior to IE9, no matter what I do. Oh, well.