Active Server Pages

Dynamic HTML provides the primary client-side programming tool for Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4.0. But Dynamic HTML is not supported by browsers such as Netscape Navigator. In fact, very little of the client-side functionality supported by various browsers can be considered truly cross-platform.

If you want to design an Internet site accessible to a number of different browsers, you need to move the programming from the client to the server. Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) allows you to create server-side applications that can be used by a variety of browsers. ASP is essentially nothing more than VBScript that runs on the server. The script code generates HTML when a page is requested. That is the key to ASP: a client never sees your code—only the resulting HTML, which can be recognized by any browser.