Tom,
I do understand regular expressions. I'm far from an regex ninja but certainly above average.
A tag library is a way to simplify jsp code (depending on your point of view). Basically you hide a chunk of code behind a tag so that you can do something like:
foo:section <foo:helloworld /> </foo:section> foo:section <foo:welcome date="yyyy-mm-dd" name="LLL, FFF" /> <p>Have you built your hover car yet?</p> </foo:section>
and you might expect to have at the browser:
<div class="section section0" > <p>Hello world!</p> <p>Lovely day, isn't it?</p> </div> <div class="sections section1"> <div class="welcome"> <p>Welcome Smith, John.</p> <p>You last visited us on 2006-08-12.</p> </div> <p>Have you built your hover car yet?</p> </div>
This sort of notation can, frequently, be easier to read if you need to allow non-technical users to edit complex code driven content. It can be a lot of work to build taglibs (few people do) but we have a big dev team on our side.
My biggest worries were with the syntax highlighting, but I guess mostly its going to highlight correctly already. Maybe I'll start by duplicaing some of the very useful things HTML does (like div+tab talk about a time saver) before I ask for more help.
A