title: Why can't I use Spring:url in an href?
body: <p>I have seen several examples using 
  
  <pre><code> &lt;a href="&lt;spring:url value='/about/' /&gt;" &gt;About &lt;/a&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I try this and get an error from Jetty</p>
  
  <pre><code>Caused by: org.apache.jasper.JasperException: /WEB-INF/views/footer.jspx(6,22) The value of attribute "href" associated with an element type "null" must not contain the '&lt;' character.
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Is there some encoding setting I have overlooked?</p>
  
  <p>This is unfortunate because the other examples of using spring url I have seen are ugly</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;spring:url value='/about' var="about_url" /&gt;
  &lt;a href="${about_url}" title="About MyFit"&gt;About MyFit&lt;/a&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Do I really need an additional line for every hyperlink in my templates?</p>
  
  <p>Is this something that is fairly trivial and I have overlooked?</p>