Weblogic 9.0 and JSTL 1.1 ${variable} expansion

Hello,

I'm involved in a "distributed" project. I develop a web app using 
Tomcat5, JSTL 1.1, Struts, Java 1.5 (but compiling for 1.4) and when I 
am done, someone somewhere else re-builds my app for Weblogic 9.0 and 
integrates with the back-end.
Unfortunately, things are not going 100% smooth.
First we had to figure out that web.xml for servlets 2.4 is not just a 
change in the header (DTD vs schema), but also the syntax has changed in 
subtle ways (taglib tags need to go inside a jsp-config tag with 2.4). 
To add to that, Tomcat5 does not complain but weblogic does! (as an 
aside, which tools do you guy use to validate the web.xml in accordance 
with the 2.4 schema?)

But let me get to my question. In my Struts action I do something like:

request.setAttribute("title", "Hi there!");

and in tomcat5, as expected, I am able to read back that value in my 
JSPs as simply as:

<a href="#"  title="${title}">

Alas, in Weblogic they are seeing "${title}" not "Hi There" !

as I said, the web.xml is correctly set (and correctly recognized) as 
2.4. We know for sure that WL 9 is supposed to handle 2.4 and JSP 2.0

http://e-docs.bea.com/wls/docs90/notes/new.html#1225583

any idea of what we may be missing?

Thanks

Luca