Static Versus Dynamic Web Pages

Many people don't understand the differences between publishing static and dynamic data. Static data doesn't change. If you want to publish information that rarely, if ever, changes, you should create a static Web page; the text at the beginning of this chapter covers the techniques for doing so. The data output for each of the methods discussed so far is static and can be changed only by republishing the data and resubmitting it to the Web.

Dynamic data, on the other hand, does change. You should save your data in the dynamic format when you know that it will change frequently and your Web application needs to store and retrieve live data from your application by using a form. To publish dynamic Web data, you have several choices. Data access pages are one solution. Microsoft targeted data access pages toward intranet rather than Internet applications. For Internet applications, you can output the object to either the ASP file format or the HTX/IDC file format instead of an HTML file.