Ok so I had two problems today with design view.   1) None of my tags where rendering in design view - This was a dependent library problem.    I had added the web center libraries manually to my project and had somehow removed the personalization    library this lead to a ClassNotFound error in my message log simple to fix once you know where to look.   2) Second problem vexed me for a while my c:set jstl tag libraries where just NOT rendering correctley in design view. This turned out to be a checkbox Execute Tags in JSP Visual Editor was unchecked.   [Project Properties > JSP Tag Libraries]