What Are Active Server Pages
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ASP
Active Server Pages (ASPs) are Web pages that contain
server-side scripts in addition to the usual mixture of text
and HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) tags. Server-side
scripts are special commands you put in Web pages that are
processed before the pages are sent from your Personal Web
Server to the Web browser of someone who's visiting your Web
site. When you type a URL in the Address box or click a link
on a Web page, you're asking a Web server on a computer somewhere
to send a file to the Web browser (sometimes called a "client")
on your computer. If that file is a normal HTML file, it looks
exactly the same when your Web browser receives it as it did
before the Web server sent it. After receiving the file, your
Web browser displays its contents as a combination of text,
images, and sounds.
In the case of an Active Server Page, the process is similar,
except there's an extra processing step that takes place just
before the Web server sends the file. Before the Web server
sends the Active Server Page to the Web browser, it runs all
server-side scripts contained in the page. Some of these scripts
display the current date, time, and other information.
Others process information the user has just typed into a
form, such as a page in the Web site's guestbook.
To distinguish them from normal HTML pages, Active Server
Pages are given the ".asp" extension.
What Can
You Do with Active Server Pages?
There are many things you can do with Active Server Pages.
You can display date, time, and other information in
different ways.
You can make a survey form and ask people who visit
your site to fill it out, send emails, save the information
to a file, etc
What Do Active
Server Pages Look Like?
The appearance of an Active Server Page depends on who or
what is viewing it. To the Web browser that receives it, an
Active Server Page looks just like a normal HTML page.
If a visitor to your Web site views the source code of an
Active Server Page, that's what they see: a normal HTML page.
However, the file located in the server looks very different.
In addition to text and HTML tags, you also see server-side
scripts. This is what the Active Server Page looks like to
the Web server before it is processed and sent in response
to a request.
What Do Server-Side
Scripts Look Like?
Server-side scripts look a lot like HTML tags. However,
instead of starting and ending with lesser-than ( < ) and
greater-than ( > ) brackets, they typically start with
<% and end with %>. The <% is called an opening tag,
and the %> is called a closing tag. In between these tags
are the server-side scripts. You can insert server-side scripts
anywhere in your Web page--even inside HTML tags.
Do You Have
to Be a Programmer to Understand Server-Side Scripting?
There's a lot you can do with server-side scripts without
learning how to program. For this reason, much of the online
Help for Active Server Pages is written for people who are familiar
with HTML but aren't computer programmers.
