What are Active Server Pages?

The world before ASP

If you have read in the beginning then you already have some idea of where ASP fits into the world of the web, but this is a more rigorous exploration of the background to ASP (with fewer references to God) and what it actually means to you.

Static pages

The first wave of pages on the WWW were static pages. If truth be known static pages are still the predominant type of pages that you will see on the internet. A static page is one delivered to the browser straight from a text file. Unless the page is edited in some way by the author what you see wont change no matter how many times you hit the "Reload/Refresh" button. For example, you may have written a home page; you would have written this in HTML and it is now served by your ISP. This page will not change, it will remain the same until you go and edit that page. Static pages are the fundamental bedrock of the WWW, but they have their limitations.

Limitation of Static Pages

Static web pages can only be used to present information that is not expected to change much through time. They are, therefore, ideal for home pages, general information pages, sites where the content is not expected to change often. They are very limiting if you want to create pages based on the actions of the person looking at your page. Take this site as an example. Every time you go to a different page the chances are you will notice that the advertisements change; try reloading this page into your browser and see what changes. Think how boring it would be if every page here had the same advert; or think how much work would have to be done editing the files all the time to ensure you saw something different each visit. Not a pretty idea.

Dynamic Pages

Static pages serve their purpose but it was soon realised that some kind of dynamic interaction was required, where the page displayed to you, the browser, can be altered dynamically by some process. There are a whole host of different ways in which dynamic pages can be created. Some of the simplest are with server includes, where you just instruct a web server to include a small amount of changeable information, like the current date and time. There are more complex facilities where entire pages can be created on the fly, with no HTML sitting in files but being created dynamically in direct response to server input. Microsoft provide just such a facility with their Internet Information Server (and others). These are ACTIVE SERVER PAGES.