title: <%@ page pageEncoding="UTF-8"%> ignored when included from another jsp
body: <p>I have code (now in <a href="https://github.com/Utumno/ted2012/tree/GitHub2/WebContent/WEB-INF/jsp/include" rel="noreferrer">github</a>) like :</p>
  
  <p><strong>my.jsp</strong> (a generic jsp - all my jspS follow this pattern more or less) <strong>:</strong></p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;%@ include file="include/top.jsp" %&gt;
  &lt;title&gt;THE TITLE&lt;/title&gt;
  &lt;%@ page language="java" contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8"
      pageEncoding="UTF-8"%&gt;
  &lt;%@ include file="include/head.jsp" %&gt;
  &lt;%@ include file="include/no_menu.jsp" %&gt;
  CONTENT
  &lt;%@ include file="include/bottom.jsp" %&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>where :</p>
  
  <p><strong>top.jsp :</strong></p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;%@ page session="false"%&gt;
  &lt;%@ include file="tag_libs.jsp"%&gt;
  &lt;!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"&gt;
  &lt;html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"&gt;
  &lt;head&gt;
  &lt;meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><strong>head.jsp :</strong></p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;link href="${pageContext.request.contextPath}/css/twoColFixLtHdr.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /&gt;
  &lt;/head&gt;
  &lt;body&gt;
      &lt;div class="container"&gt;&lt;!-- closes in bottom --&gt;
          &lt;div class="header"&gt;&lt;!-- closes in menu --&gt;
              &lt;p&gt;
                  &lt;a href="home"&gt; &lt;img src="${pageContext.request.contextPath}/images/logo7.jpg"
                      alt="Ted 2012 Logo" name="Ted 2012 Logo" id="Ted_2012_Logo"
                      style="background: display:block; padding: 5px 20px; margin-left: 150px; border-style: solid" /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;
              &lt;/p&gt;
              &lt;hr /&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><strong>no_menu.jsp :</strong></p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;/div&gt;
  &lt;div class="content"&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><strong>bottom.jsp :</strong></p>
  
  <pre><code>        &lt;/div&gt;
          &lt;div class="footer"&gt;
              &lt;p&gt;
                  blah
              &lt;/p&gt;
          &lt;/div&gt;
      &lt;/div&gt;
  &lt;/body&gt;
  &lt;/html&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>As you see - or you can take my word for it - the tags balance correctly. My question is - <em>why can't I include the</em> </p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;%@ page language="java" contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8"
      pageEncoding="UTF-8"%&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><em>directive in my <code>top.jsp</code> file</em> ? Believe me it does nothing. <em>Should I worry that the <code>&lt;%@ page session="false"%&gt;</code> is similarly ignored</em> ?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks</p>