html compared to asp?

Hey there,

You can't really compare HTML directly with ASP since they're for different purposes. If your experienced in HTML, I'm sure you've come across perl or CGI scripts for the purposes of sending forms and so on. In so far as I use it, ASP is like those - a bolt-on for HTML pages.

The beauty of it is that ASP script allows your webpages to interact with databases stored on the web server, like PHP for example. This means that if you're designing a large site, with many instances of the same page, for example a profile of a member of staff, or product detail page, you can make the page only once and put all the details in an Access database. Then, whenever you load the page, you simply tell it the ID of the relevant record in the database, and ASP coding fills in the blanks! Thus, updating pages is made a LOT easier! This is also useful for allowing non-savvy web-users to update their own pages through simple forms.

Thats all i've got time to write now, but I hope it helps!

HTML is static i.e. once a page is uploaded to server, it is ALWAYS the same, each time a visitor requests it.

ASP on the contrary is dynamic. The above page, for instance, could be provided with code for showing up the "last update" date of that page, or time anda date with reference to  the country of the visitors.

But the main adavantage of ASP is that your site can completely rely on data loaded into a database (Microsoft, Oracle, other flavors).
In this way, if your site counts -say- four thousands pages and you want to change the background color for all the pages, you can do this by just modifying one little value into the database instead of changing it four thousand times "manually".

Of course, the rest is up to yur fantasy. Macromedia DreqmWeaver allows you to deal with databases in a relatively simple way and many tasks on DB have always been hard coded in DW: just select the proper behaviour and db-connections and you are done.

Hope this helps. Good luck with ASP ;-)

Pasquale