There's no technical reason that I know of to prefer one to the other. As a matter of style, I prefer an absolute path for those things. In fact, I my preference is to put the templates off somewhere in /WEB-INF to really make things nice and clean. <ui:composition template="/WEB-INF/template.xhtml"> or <ui:include src="/WEB-INF/incl/cart.xhtml" /> Unfortunately, this practice doesn't seem to have caught on, so people keep running into relative path problems and run the risk of unexpected things happening if someone tries to access the template instead of the real page. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4063264#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...