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What is Hypertext Mark Up Language (HTML)Before we can fully understand Active Server Pages we do need to have a basic understanding of Hypertext Mark Up Language (HTML). You can recognise a HTML document as its file name will end with the file extension .html or more recently .htm. HTML is a language used to describe the layout and structure of a document. The concept is that the document information or content is prepared in text format and the HTML tags are used to surround this content and describes the way the content should be presented. For example: <p>The content goes here</p> The tags <p> and </p> mark the beginning and end of the content and indicate that the text “The content goes here” represents a paragraph of information. HTML is widely used on the internet so that documents can be transferred in small, efficient packages to end users and then the mark up contained within the document can be used to determine how the look and structure of the document should be displayed using a browser. The conventional process for viewing a web page is that the end user requests the web page (the HTML document) using a web browser. The request is sent by the web browser across the internet to a web server (the computer on which the web page is stored). The web server receives this request, retrieves the correct web page and passes this back across the internet to the web browser. The web browser receives this file and displays the web page content in accordance with the instructions contained within the HTML.
HTML is a simple tool which can be combined with other technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to produce dramatic and impressive web pages viewable by millions of users all over the world. However it is primarily used to present static content. Using HTML alone the author of the document determines the information and content at the time of its creation. This approach is fine provided that we know the content of the document at the time the document is created, for example a sales brochure with fixed predetermined information. What should we do if the document content regularly changes or isn’t even known at the time of the creation of the document? Let’s say we wish to add the date to the top of the page. Should we recreate the page each day to change the date information at the top of the page? Enter Active Server Pages!
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