While you can have some active content in HTML like forms etc, pure HTML doesn't come close to what you can do with a server side language like ASP.NET.

There are really 3 versions of ASP about. Traditional Microsoft ASP, Microsoft's ASP.NET, and Sun's offering Sun One ASP.

Other server side languages include PHP and Perl CGI. Between the 3 of them they have revolutionised the way we use both the Internet, and corporate Intranets. Instead of just reading pages on the Internet we can actually get them to do useful things. Entire applications are often written in ASP now a days as an alternative to traditional fat client languages like VB, VB.NET, C# etc.

Online banking websites, shopping websites, auction websites, websites that give directions to where you want to go and many others all use server side languages.

So which is the best server side language? Well now there's a question, I guess the answer is it depends what you want to do with them.

If you want to write an application that will be deployed on corporate Intranets then the language you develop in needs to be simple, efficient, easy to install, and will work in 99.9% of cases, it has to be Microsoft's ASP.NET.

This is what CI Search is written in. It allowed us to build a robust and flexible Indexing service front end and include pretty much any functionality we wanted to. This included things like checking that a user has rights to open each result before it is displayed.

The king of the Internet though simply has to be a double act.. PHP working with a MYSQL Database. Pretty much every hosting company in the world supports that combination. Its fast, relatively easy to learn, and extremely capable.