ASP stands for Active Server Pages. ASP is a program that runs inside IIS, which comes as a free component with Windows 2000/NT/XP

The Option Pack can be downloaded from Microsoft. PWS is a smaller - but fully functional - version of IIS. PWS can be found on your Windows 95/98 CD

An ASP file is just the same as an HTML file. An ASP file can contain text, HTML, XML, and scripts
Scripts in an ASP file are executed on the server. ASP file has the file extension ".asp"

When a browser requests an HTML file, the server returns the file. When a browser requests an ASP file, IIS passes the request to the ASP engine. The ASP engine reads the ASP file, line by line, and executes the scripts in the file. Finally, the ASP file is returned to the browser as plain HTML.