Actually, this concern is legitimate. I can confirm that both of you are correct. If you run the seam examples, they work perfectly. If you use your own setup with jsf-facelets-1.1.11.jar, then you get an error when trying to use the bare <ui:insert />. Apparently, seam has a modified (or just alternate) version of Facelets other than the latest stable 1.1.11 version. Does anyone know which version of facelets is bundled with Seam? I can assure you that if you take the jsf-facelets-1.1.11.jar file and put it into the seam distribution, the examples using s:decorate with templates will not work. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4052867#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...