migrating from custom tags

We currently have a website with only a couple of pages.  Page1 serves 
as a front controller that allows people to browse a catalog and add 
things to their shopping cart.  Page2 lets them view their shopping 
cart.
   Page1 is a .jsp filled with scriptlets and custom tags.  I'd like to 
convert this page to HTML and pull all of the logic from the custom 
tags into utility classes that we can use from our servlet to 
manipulate the HTML DOM using XMLC.  One thing that is going to be 
tricky is that one of our custom tags creates a nested table structure. 
  The database contains a hierarchy of categories and those categories 
are arranged in an HTML table in a way that's easy to grok.  Would 
there be any problem turning that custom tag into a utility class that 
just returns the whole nested table HTML as one fat String and slapping 
that into the DOM with a setFooText(fatStringHere) call?  Or do we need 
to create new nodes in the DOM and create every HTML element present in 
the nested table structure?
   Since we already have this code working I'd like to leave it as is if 
at all possible.
   Any ideas would be appreciated.
    -M@