ASP or Active Server Page is a type of HTML page but with added scripting for some minor programming tasks. HTML or Hypertext Mark-Up Language deals with how pages are displayed for the online users. Adding scripts or mini-programs through ASP basically makes the page dynamic and interactive. When there is scripting embedded in an HTML page, it simply means that part of the page-loading is produced by user input. With users involved, an otherwise static HTML webpage becomes interactive and dynamic. Through ASP, small programs are interpreted and read first by the corresponding server before letting the users view the actual page.

Active Server Pages is developed by Microsoft to work on any browser. This means that no matter what web browser is used, the page will be displayed as it was meant to be including the processing of the mini-program embedded through its ASP scripting engine. To make pages dynamic, some scripts or mini-programming codes are included in the display codes of the basic HTML page. Pages that contain these scripts or mini-programs are labelled with the .ASP extension rather than the usual .HTM or .HTML extension. When a particular server encounters a page labelled with .ASP, it will read and process the scripting language embedded in the page before producing the page for the end-users. With this kind of feature, ASP or Active Server Pages can only be read and processed by compatible servers or those that are able to read the programming scripts. Even if the browser can actually put a display of the basic HTML page, the server must support the scripting provided by ASP. Otherwise, the mini-programs cannot be processed and run by the server and the page may not be able to put the correct display. The best thing about ASPs though is that web pages can be viewed using different browsers as long as the server supports the scripting engine.