Active Server Pages	Perl
CGI	Scripting Languages
CSS	Server Side Includes
HTML	VBScript
Java	VRML
JavaScript	XML
JScript

     Active Server Pages are basically HTML files which have scripting languages commands and routines embeded for the server to execute before sending the page to the browser. The standard extension for and Active Server Page document is .ASP and it is a technology of Microsoft's Internet Information Services. The scripting languages used in Active Server Pages are VBScript and JScript. (JavaScript)
     Active Server Pages are very useful for creating database driven pages and sites.

     CGI stands for Common Gateway Interface and it is used for processing forms and dynamically producing HTML documents. It is not a language in and of itself. Perl is commonly the language used.

     CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS is a language for describing detailed styles, for text and other HTML elements. With CSS you can describe font, color, border, positioning, and size with much greater flexibility than standard HTML allows. Styles can be defined within the HTML code item by item, or in a separate file, allowing reliable site-wide standardization and control of visual elements.

     Nowadays, CSS have become something of a standard element of HTML to the point that modern HTML specifications have done away with most of the old tags and properties which perform functions that CSS is now capable of performing.

     This is an acronym which means Hypertext Markup Language. It is the principle language of the World Wide Web. HTML files are written in this language, which at base is fairly simple. It's main purpose is to describe the layout of information (some text) in a general way that can be displayed on a wide variety of systems.

     A programming language developed by Sun Microsystems which is very closely related to C. The language was developed to be very general in nature so that it could be interpreted by computers of different types (Apple, IBM Compatible) running different operating systems. (Windows, Unix) Java was designed to be a kind of efficient universal language of computers.

     JavaScript is a Scripting Language. It is a standard used by Netscape and is used inside HTML documents to do things HTML can't do by itself. It's a language which allows some rudimentary manipulation of the web page and its environment.
     JavaScript is also used by the server sometimes in Active Server Pages to dynamically create web pages before they even get to the browser. (Microsoft will call it JScript, not JavaScript.)

     Thanks to the browser wars, Microsoft felt they had to do something different, but the same, so they reinvented JavaScript, gave it almost the same name and slapped their name on it. Forget about it. Everybody who wasn't hit by cupid while looking at Microsoft's logo just says "JavaScript" anyway and most stuff runs exactly the same on both browsers. A new standard combining the two has also been created called "ECMAScript", but everybody still calls it "JavaScript" and this may be the only place you ever see it mentioned, so keep smiling because all you have to remember is "JavaScript".

     Perl is another scripting language. Perl come from the UNIX environment, though it is now used on many platforms. It is not used in HTML documents at all except indirectly. It can create HTML documents live and can access rudimentary databases. It is used frequently for processing forms on the internet.
     The fact that Perl is available for most servers along with some of it's history and unique strengths make Perl a very important scripting language. It can work with the server in a very nuts and bolts kind of way.

     The main differences between scripting languages and more formal programming languages like C is that scripting languages like JavaScript are not compiled, which means they remain exactly as the programmer wrote them and are not translated to be interpreted directly by a CPU nor are they translated into a form that is very efficient for the computer to read. Consequently scripting languages are not used for very intensive programming.
     Scripting languages have the advantage of not requiring much extra software aside from rather universally available software for interpreting the script. Scripting languages also have a tendancy to be a little simpler than more formal programming languages. Often the scripts are designed to be almost exactly the same (if not exactly the same) as the language users normally use to do things with their computer. Batch files in DOS are pretty much a list of commands the same as one would use in the DOS shell. (Which old time computer users used to live in.)

     This is a very basic way to embed dynamic or common cookie-cutter information in a web page. It can run CGI programs and other programs and it can be used to insert common information from outside files. Information like addresses and phone numbers, or standard site layout code that might change in the future. This would allow one to change the single file which the SSI inserts into your site's pages without having to edit each individual page.
     SSI's are easy to use and make site much easier to manage saving alot of time.

     This one is also somewhat related to the browser wars. Once again Microsoft is competing with JavaScript, but this language was not newly invented and it is different. The "VB" in VBScript stands for "Visual Basic", which is a more formal programming language developed in the style of an older scripting language, BASIC. There were many kinds of BASIC (Principally GWBASIC and Microsoft's QuickBASIC) and it was designed as a kind of beginner's programming language, consequently it was made rather user friendly.
     BASIC was a DOS based language and as Windows came to replace DOS, the people at Microsoft went to make a version of BASIC that was designed for Windows. It got a little bit more complicated, but it's still a heck of alot more friendly than C. It would seem a natural candidate to be recast as a web scripting language and so it was.
     Unlike JScript, people not addicted to Microsoft actually talk about VBScript. It's not used so much in web pages for the browser to run, though it was designed to be used that way. It really couldn't compete with JavaScript there as Netscape just wouldn't support it. However it is used in Active Server Pages and is the standard language in that arena, and thus it has survived.

     VRML is the Virtual Reality Modeling Language and is not much like HTML at all. It is used to create 3-D environments. VRML is linkable, can be animated, and can implement Java and/or JavaScript so you could really make a whole site out of it, but it requires a plugin which does not come standard with browsers. (Though for a brief time it came with Netscape Navigator.)

     XML is a kind of all-purpose markup language that is more about data and language structure than it is about defining specific markup code. It is very much like HTML, but HTML is not valid XML. A new XHTML has been created which put HTML in compliance with the more rigorous standards of XML. With XML one defines a custom markup language for specific applications. The uniform structure of XML allows for all-purpose XML readers to be developed which interpret universal XML structure making it easily accessible for specific applications.