Understanding Web Scripts

With PowerPoint's Web functionality, you can save presentations as HTML documents and edit them in the Microsoft Script Editor. If you know HTML, you can edit HTML tags in this editor. If you know a scripting language such as VBScript or JScript, you can create powerful scripts to augment and automate your Web-based presentations.

Microsoft Internet Explorer has embedded inside it the general-purpose core of the lightweight, object-oriented programming language called JScript. This embedded code lets browsers read and execute JScript code contained in HTML documents.

NOTE

Internet Explorer also recognizes the VBScript scripting language. If you've ever used Visual Basic or Visual Basic for Applications, VBScript will seem familiar.

When the browser executes the code, it's called client-side scripting. There's also something called server-side scripting. Understanding the client-side/server-side distinction can be tricky. In Web scripting, the server is the computer (called the Web server ) that contains Web pages and "serves" them to computers that request them over the Internet, and the client is the PC of a user viewing the Web pages over the Internet.

Whether a script is called client side or server side depends on where it runs. A server-side script executes on the Web server, which sends the results to the client's browser. A client-side script executes in the client's browser after the Web server sends the script to it.