Re: Active Server Page Surprise

G'Day Lauren,

In this instance I think I'll back-pedal and go with Larry's original 
assessment :-)

At 08:38 PM 11/22/2001 -0800, you wrote:
>There is absolutely nothing on these pages that would indicate that this is
>anything other that plain ole, plain ole, HTML.

That's because the version you are seeing has already been parsed by the 
server and the bits between <% and %> have been transformed into HTML

>Now, please tell me, since I don't have FTP access to original files at this
>point, why is it that downloading the source page and saving it to obtain a
>copy of the code won't work?

Because you don't get the whole code, only the results.  Let's see if I can 
find a simple example:

1. Imagine a page that grabbed the current day and wrote "Today is Friday" 
(well it is here at any rate :-)
2. You have saved this HTML source and publish it on a web site
3. Someone visits the site on Wednesday.  On your site it would say "Today 
is Friday" because that's what the HTML says.  On the original site it 
would again grab the correct day and state "Today is Wednesday".

This is the problem in it's simplest case - it can get MUCH 
worse!!  Depending upon circumstances, the same ASP page could display 
either a login script, a form requesting input, or a results page from the 
form - all in the one script!

With FTP access, you can access the original files before they are 
processed by the web server.

Chris Higgs
Manager, New Learning Technology
ILFR, University of Melbourne
http://www.landfood.unimelb.edu.au/
Phone: +61 3 8344 9749  Fax: + 61 3 9348 2156

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