ASP( Active Server Pages)

What is ASP?

As you can see by the title, ASP is an acronym for Active Server Pages.

ASP is developed by Microsoft. It is not really a standard ASP is neither a real programming language nor is it a programming language, but it's a Microsoft technology that lets you use so-called scripting in your documents.

To describe what an ASP page is, you could say that it is a file with the extension .asp that contains a combination of HTML tags and scripts that run on a web server.

How does ASP work?

The best way to explain how ASP works is by comparing it with standard HTML. Imagine you type the address of an HTML document (eg.http://www.mysite.com/page.htm) in the address line of the browser. This way you request an HTML page. It could be illustrated like this:

As you can see, the server simply sends an HTML file to the client. But if you instead type http://www.mysite.com/page.asp - and thus request an ASP page - the server is put to work:

The server first reads the ASP file carefully to see if there are any tasks that need to be executed. Only when the server has done what it is supposed to do, the result is then sent to the client. It is important to understand that the client only sees the result of the server's work - not the actual instructions.

This means that if you click "view source" on an ASP page, you do not see the ASP codes - only basic HTML tags. Therefore, you can not see how an ASP page is made by using "view source". You have to learn ASP in other ways, for example, by reading this tutorial.