What is a taglib directive in JSP?

The JavaServer Pages API allow you to define custom JSP tags that look like HTML or XML tags and a tag library is a set of user-defined tags that implement custom behavior.

The taglib directive declares that your JSP page uses a set of custom tags, identifies the location of the library, and provides means for identifying the custom tags in your JSP page.

The taglib directive follows the syntax given below −

<%@ taglib uri="uri" prefix = "prefixOfTag" >

Here, the uri attribute value resolves to a location the container understands and the prefix attribute informs a container what bits of markup are custom actions.

You can write the XML equivalent of the above syntax as follows −

<jsp:directive.taglib uri = "uri" prefix = "prefixOfTag" />