ASP is also an abbreviation for application service provider. An Active Server Page (ASP) is an HTML page that includes one or more scripts (small embedded programs) that are processed on a Microsoft Web server before the page is sent to the user. An ASP is somewhat similar to a server-side include or a common gateway interface (CGI) application in that all involve programs that run on the server, usually tailoring a page for the user. Typically, the script in the Web page at the server uses input received as the result of the user's request for the page to access data from a database and then builds or customizes the page on the fly before sending it to the requestor. ASP (aka Classic ASP) was introduced in 1998 as Microsoft's first server side scripting language. Classic ASP pages have the file extension .asp and are normally written in VBScript.