VBScript for Web Development

VBScript is not about creating applications; it's about creating dynamic HTML. If your pages look and work like apps, that's fine.

VBScript is a member of Microsoft's Visual Basic family of development products. Other members include Visual Basic and Visual Basic for Applications, which is the scripting language for Microsoft Excel.

VBScript is a scripting language for HTML pages on the World Wide Web and corporate intranets.

One of the things you should be interested in is the safety and security of client machines that access your Web site. Microsoft took this consideration into account when creating VBScript.

Potentially dangerous operations that can be done in Visual Basic have been removed from VBScript, including the capability to access dynamic link libraries directly and to access the file system on the client machine.

In most VBScript programs, you'll need to attach the initialization of a program to some sort of action. In the tester.htm page, use the button click event to trigger the action that takes place.

To be able to see what happens, we need to change the property of a control on the page, or we can use a message box. Once we have the skeleton program in place, we can test code in the browser.

The most important thing that you're doing when you're using VBScript in your Web pages is bringing the pages to life.

Dead, static pages on the Web are about as exciting as slides on television. In the future, pages will be designed on the fly, tailored to the profile of the individual user.

The VBScript language enables you to take an object in your HTML page and control it with a subset of the Visual Basic language.

It's a subset of the language because, with HTML documents being loaded dynamically from the Internet, you want to be sure that the page itself isn't capable of any mischief. For example, you wouldn't want the scripting language to be able to format a hard drive, insert a virus, or gather information from your machine without your knowledge.

HTML is a standard that maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). W3C is a group of individuals and companies that develop and approve standards for the Web. HTML isn't the only standard maintained by W3C.

W3C also supports transport protocols, graphics formats for the Web, objects for the Web, and of course the implementation of scripting languages such as VBScript.

The LANGUAGE= attribute sets the scripting language in the <SCRIPT> tag.

For VBScript, the language tag is "VBScript." The VBScript code itself closed with the </SCRIPT> tag.