web.xml for jstl-Collection of common programming errors

This can happen if you either downloaded the ancient JSTL 1.0 which has a different URI, or you placed the JAR’s in the wrong place (i.e. not in /WEB-INF/lib or anywhere in webapp’s runtime classpath).

Ensure that you download the right version and put the JAR(s) in /WEB-INF/lib. For a webapplication whose web.xml is declared as Servlet 2.5, you need to download just JSTL 1.2 as jstl-1.2.jar. For a Servlet 2.4 webapplication, you need to download JSTL 1.1 as jstl.jar and standard.jar.

You don’t need to extract the JAR’s. You also don’t need to modify the web.xml as some poor online tutorials suggest. Just drop JAR(s) in runtime classpath, declare the taglib in JSP and that’s it.