An HTML5 friendly markup

After Java EE 7 and the release of JSF 2.2, the framework always renders the HTML5 document type: <DOCTYPE html>. This is the default behavior for the modern digital websites. With the HTML5 support, developers can just write the content in a Facelets view (a *.xhtml file) that is compatible with the rendering engines in a modern web browser.

JSF 2.2 provides two types of attributes for the HTML elements: pass-through attributes and pass-through elements.

The pass-through attributes

The pass-through attributes enable JSF to seamlessly support the new and extended attributes that are defined by the HTML5. These attributes are applicable to the JSF HTML render kit custom tags such as <h:inputText>. In order to use the pass-through attributes, we will define a JSF namespace at the top of the Facelets view that references the URL http://xmlns.jcp.org/jsf/passthrough.

Let's take an example that uses the HTML5 attributes for a placeholder text:

<html...