[normand cote]
The following bit validates ok at http://validator.w3.org but fails as input to a page template ("EOF in middle of construct"). The problem is that the attributes on the span tag are not separated by whitespace. It works fine as a dtml method, though.
Hmm, sounds like a bug in the validator. I think (not sure, though) that SGML requires a space between attribute name/value pairs. Ceratinly XML does. The HTML 4.01 Rec says about attributes - "Attribute/value pairs appear before the final ">" of an element's start tag. Any number of (legal) attribute value pairs, separated by spaces, may appear in an element's start tag."
The reason this is such a problem is that Dreamweaver MX (and perhaps other versions) tends to create markup that looks like this, and it is the most common tool used by page designers with whom I work.
Perhaps browsers have been tolerant of run-together attributes, but it is a bad idea to encourage at this point. They will mess up any conversion to xml or xhtml. I am surprised that DW would emit bad markup like that, even if browsers accept it. Rather than try to hack the ZPT parser to allow these constructions, better to write a preprocessor to fix them up, I think. Cheers, Tom P