Special Edition Using Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET

Bringing Dynamic Content to the Web

In the early days of the Web, most pages were just static HTML documents. However, eventually more complex Web applications emerged, such as online stores and library catalogs. Other than the ability to exchange data with the server, HTML by itself does not have any real programming power. To make complex Web applications work, the Web server software has to do more than just relay the contents of an HTML file back to a browser; instead it actually has to generate HTML dynamically. One early way of creating dynamic content was to write a program in C or another language that was executed by the Web server. The server acted as a “gateway” between the Web and the program, which could perform activities such ...