Whenever you're adding a new page to your web site, you have
a decision to make. Should it be a plain HTML page or should
it be an ASP script? Even if the page doesn't do any processing,
can you guarantee it'll stay that way? The last thing you want
to do is start renaming files and causing your users' bookmarks
to become invalid. So what should you do...
Make everything an ASP file even if it contains no ASP! In
times gone by this was a very bad idea. IIS 4 and earlier
processed every file with an ASP extension regardless of whether
or not it contained script. So making every file an ASP file
resulted in a large amount of unnecessary processing and worse
yet caused pages to take longer to serve.
Fortunately, Microsoft has fixed this in IIS 5. When IIS 5
opens an ASP page, before it starts the actual processing,
it does a very quick check to ensure the file actually
contains script. If it doesn't it simply sends it on it's
merry way to the client. As a result, on IIS 5 and later,
there's really no reason why you can't make every page an
ASP page. Just leave the ASP out of the file!
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