Why ASP?

What are the advantages over HTML?

[TimmyMagic]

Hi,

I am in the early stage of setting up a new site. I have looked at a few sites and noticed they are written using .asp. I have no experience of this and was wondering if someone could briefly tell me what are the benefits over html?

Thankyou,

Tim

[txbakers]

TAke a brief search through the forums (use the site search button at the top) and you'll find lots of information about ASP.

Basically, ASP can provide dynamic content - you can read from a database, you can filter based on user preferences, you can interact with the user much more than with static HTML.

Also, you can make templates and subpages which can be included together to form a whole page, making maintenance easier.

[korkus2000]

ASP and PHP, to name a few, are dynamic languages. They both spit out HTML. You write code that is processed on the server and it returns HTML. txbakers explained most of the advantages. Email, form processing, dynamic content creation, dynamic page creation, and anything you have ever seen a web site do. It makes the web capable of having applications.

[webboy1]

I only started learning ASP last year. For a while i had wondered why it is better than plain HTMl.......now i wouldn't stop using it for the world!

Both ASP and PHP can not only help make your site more interesting....they can also make the site harder to maintain.

To give you an example fo the smallish things you can do to make life easier:

Imagine you had 10 photos you wanted the user to view by using a 'back' and 'next' button. In HTML you would have to create 10 separate HTML pages, each with its own picture, then go through each creating all the back and next links. All good and well if you only have 10 pictures, but what if it were 20 or 30 or more!

I had this problem recently. I decided i WASN'T going to build a page for every new image, so i created one ASP page.

The back and next links pass variables to the same page i.e. the buttons link to gallery.asp?image=1, gallery.asp?image=2 etc etc

Then, with a little more ASP i can have a 10 page photo album working as 1 page!

Its little things like this, as well as the more complicated script involviing SQL etc that make it such a good language to use.

PHP is every bit as good, although where i work we have a windows server, so i tend to swing more towards ASP.

[Gibble]

Both ASP and PHP can not only help make your site more interesting....they can also make the site harder to maintain.

I think you meant easier to maintain, correct?

[TimmyMagic]

thanks for explaining about ASP.

I can see why it is useful. Thanks for your explaination webboy. Very interesting.

My website doesn't require database info or anything like that. So my question is does ASP load quicker than standard html pages?

[txbakers]

So my question is does ASP load quicker than standard html pages?

No. But we're talking milliseconds of difference.

ASP has to be interpreted by the server first, before rending HTML. HTML is just HTML.

You'll never notice the difference.