It sounds like you may be facing some other challenges, not necessarily related to those you describe. If you've been developing portlets with html, head, and body tags, that's a problem. Your layout should contain those tags, but as you point out - because portlets are aggregated onto a single webpage - your portlets should not. See section PLTB (page 113) of the http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=168]Portlet spec (JSR168). First things first - I'd work on getting your generated markup validating. You can use the following tools to check that your markup is valid: FireFox plugin: Html Validator http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/ (this tool validates on the fly using the same parser as the w3.org site - very cool!) FireFox plugin: Web Developer toolbar https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60 IE6/7 plugin: Web Accessibility Toolbar http://www.visionaustralia.org.au/info.aspx?page=619 Safari plugin: Safari Tidy http://zappatic.net/safaritidy/ Manual entry: W3C validator http://validator.w3.org/ As for your JSF/Richfaces issues, I'd recommend starting with this article: http://www.infoq.com/articles/jsf-ajax-seam-portlets-pt-1 View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4203392#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...