If I have a tagfile such as: view.tag which contains: <%@attribute name="redirect" required="true"%> <%@attribute name="course" type="org.oclc.webjunction.portlet.courses.model.Course" required="true" %> Hello <%=redirect%> It works. I can go to a jsp, call this like <cart:view redirect="" course="" /> and the redirect and course show up nice and pretty. If I do this though: view.tag <%@attribute name="redirect" required="true"%> <%@attribute name="course" type="org.oclc.webjunction.portlet.courses.model.Course" required="true" %> <%@ include file="init.tag"%> it won't, it expects the attributes to be in init.tag. If I move them there, it works again. Herein lies the problem. I do this a lot: view.tag <%@ include file="init.tag"%> init.tag <%@ include file="/html/common/tags/init-common.tag"%> and it requires me to put my attributes in common to work! I use common for storing just things that will be used across all my tags, as such I can't be declaring attributes there. The fix is to allow code completion of attributes from any file, not just the farthest include.