An Active Server Pages consists of web files grouped into a
web site with some files used to perform the necessary processing. To support
the various possible scenarios of this type of application, there are two main
categories of files you will use: regular pages and ASP-based files.
An HTML-based application is a web-based project that mostly
includes regular pages with HTML tags, optional Cascading Style Sheet
formatting, and optional scripts to perform some tasks that are difficult or
impossible with only HTML. You can also use other formatting languages like XML
to support some type of data in your application but an HTML-based application
is primarily meant to use HTML tags to present text and graphics to a visitor.
With this type of application, you usually don't expect any back-and-forth
interaction between the visitor and you.
To create an HTML-based application, there is no special
thing to do in Microsoft Visual Studio because the structure of this type of
application lies on its use of web-oriented files. There are only two primary
requirements. To start, you must create a folder with a name of your choice. You
can create this folder using a utility such as Windows Explorer or My Computer.
After creating the folder of your web-based application, you
can
create the necessary files for it. The most regularly used files are text-based
but they have the .htm or .html extension. This type of file is called an HTML
file. You can create the file using Notepad. Alternatively, you can use a
commercial application such as Microsoft FrontPage or Microsoft Visual Studio
.NET to create an HTML file
HTML has limitations that make it impossible to support an
active level of interaction between a visitor and you. This is why Microsoft
developed Active Server Pages, which was a technique of using Microsoft Internet
Information Server (4.0) and scripting languages such as VBScript or JavaScript
to create interactive pages, more structured that traditional HTML files. An
Active Server Pages application is a web site that includes HTML and optional
files that have an .asp extension. In fact, the essence of an ASP-based
application is to have at least one file with that extension.
You can create an Active Server Pages application without
using any formal programming environment. To start, you should create a folder
that would hold the files of your application. You can use Windows Explorer or
My Computer to do this. If you want, the next non-required step would consist of
creating a simple text-based file named Global and that has the .asax
extension (Global.asax). This file would be used later on to process
files at the application level. In Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0, to support Active Server
Pages, Microsoft created Visual Interdev.
After creating the necessary folder for your project, you can create the necessary files. You can use Notepad
to create the file(s) as long as you remember to add the .asp extension when you
decide to save it(them).
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Web Controls
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A web control is an object added to a web page and
that allows the user to request or submit values to your server. These
lessons assume that you are familiar with how to create these controls
from your background in VBScript.
At the risk of repeating everything, we'd rather not review them here.
Still, in the next lesson, we will review
forms.
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Cascading Style Sheet
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Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) is a technique of assisting HTML with some
formatting applied to a control on a web page. If you have studied Cascading
Style Sheet, everything you know about this formatting language can be applied
to Active Server Pages.
As you may know, there are three main ways CSS is used in a web page. To apply
it to an HTML tag, you create a style attribute in the HTML tag and assign
the necessary values to it. For a <p> tag, it can start as follows:
<p style=""></p>
This can be referred to as local style because it affects only the tag in which
the style is created. If you use this technique, each (HTML or Active Server Pages) tag must
have its own style.
What goes inside of the double-quotes of the style attribute depends on what
formatting you want to apply. You must
respect the rules of Cascading Style Sheet when adding a style.
The second technique used to apply Cascading Style Sheet to your web page
consists of creating the necessary styles in the <head> tag of the file. Here is an example from an ASP file:
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<%@ Language="VBScript" %>
<html>
<head>
<title>Active Server Pages Tutorials</title>
<style>
body {
font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, 'Sans Serif';
color: #000000;
font-size: 10pt;
background-color: #FF9900 }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Lesson 3: Active Pages</h1>
<% Response.Write("<b>Lecturer:</b> Benjamin Jacobson") %>
<br>
<% Response.Write("<b>Time Allocated:</b> <i>52 minutes</i>") %>
<p>This lesson shows different ways of displaying items on a
web page. The instructions involve both HTML and scripts</p>
<h3>Enjoy</h3>
</body>
</html>
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This can be referred to as file-level style because the style created in the
head section affects, or can be applied to, any tag of the page. If you use this
technique, each HTML tag that is tied to the HTML tag defined, such
as <body> in this case would be affected.
As you probably know already, Cascading Style Sheet
also supports a type of pseudo-object-oriented-programming where you
create classes and define their characteristics using existing CSS
keywords. Here is an example:
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<%@ Language="VBScript" %>
<html>
<head>
<title>Active Server Pages Tutorials</title>
<style>
body {
font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, 'Sans Serif';
color: #000000;
font-size: 10pt;
background-color: #FF9900 }
.maintitle {
font-family: Georgia, Garamond, 'Times New Roman';
font-size: 24pt;
color: #FF0000;
text-align: center;
font-weight: bold }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<p class="maintitle">Lesson 3: Active Pages</p>
<% Response.Write("<b>Lecturer:</b> Benjamin Jacobson") %>
<br>
<% Response.Write("<b>Time Allocated:</b> <i>52 minutes</i>") %>
<p>This lesson shows different ways of displaying items on a
web page. The instructions involve both HTML and scripts</p>
<h3>Enjoy</h3>
</body>
</html>
The third technique used to integrate CSS in your web
page consists of creating a separate CSS file and referencing it in your
(HTML or Active Server Pages) web page. After creating and saving the file
with .css extension, you can reference it by its name. For example if you
create a file named Example.css, to use its formats in your web page, in
the head section of the page, you would type:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="Example.css">
The advantage of this application-level style is that
the same style can be applied to different pages of your web site, as long
as you remember to reference the CSS file.
Active Server Pages supports all three techniques of
using CSS in your web pages. You can create your CSS formatting using
Notepad or any text editor. You can also use any commercial application of
your choice, such as Microsoft FrontPage or Microsoft Visual Studio .NET,
to create the CSS code.
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