A technology from Microsoft to generate server-side dynamic web pages. Its core is an extension to HTML syntax that allows program fragments written in a scripting language (usually VBScript) to be embedded in web page templates; these scripts are executed by an ASP-aware web server and their results are combined with the template to form the web page sent to the client. Introduced in 1996, ASP is now part of the .NET framework (ASP.NET) and web pages can be created in any .NET programming language. See also JavaServer Pages.