Active Server Pages 3.0 from Scratch

ASP Basics

Now that you have the basics of HTML, it's time to move on to actual Active Server Pages. First you need to tell the Web server that you want an Active Server Page so it knows to look for ASP commands.

A Web server knows what to do with a file based on the file extension, or the letters after the period in the name. For example, the file extension for index.htm is htm. This extension tells the server that the file is just a plan HTML file, so it should serve it as is, and let the browser know to look out for tags.

When we created our second file, index.asp, we told the web server that there may be ASP commands in it, so look for them before serving the page. In past versions of IIS, this caused the server to process the page as though ...