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When the Web development team at the South Western Sydney Area Health Service began to redevelop "Livtrauma I" it was not an easy task. Management of the information was definitely a key criteria in the redevelopment of the web pages. A full draft of the web site was initially sketched, outlining how each section would interact with each another. A navigation system was then needed to withstand each of the sections and their information. Colours and graphics were distinctly designed to deal with the topics at hand. Graphics were developed in Adobe™ Photoshop 4.0, Microsoft™ Image Composer 1.5 and Microsoft™ GIF Animator. All the HTML was developed in Allaire™ Homesite 2.5a, the perfect HTML editor for developing web pages with extreme ease. The main technology which was used in developing Livtrauma II was Microsoft's™ Active Server Pages. Notice the page extensions on all the web pages within Livtrauma II. They're all ".asp". Active Server Pages is a technology introduced by Microsoft in Internet Information Server 3.0. It adds the capability of customizing Web pages on the server before they're transmitted over the network to the browser requesting them. Although there are other means to customize Web pages, none is more elegant and powerful than Active Server Pages. Programmability is its key feature, but more important is the ease of adding that programmability. With Active Server Pages, program scripts can be added directly to the Web page and inserted precisely between the HTML instructions that need to be customized. Instead of writing lengthy, hard-to-read C programs or Perl scripts that disguise the HTML instructions and leave you wondering just what obfuscated output the programs generate, with Active Server Pages, you can put the code you want right were you want it. You can start with a complete, viewable HTML document and incrementally customise it with small fragments of script code that automatically direct the changes to the document when the code is executed on the server. With Active Server Pages, the code you add to the HTML documents is not unlike the code you might normally add to the same document to have interactive behavior that runs on the client side. Most browsers, for some time, have been able to host scripting code that's executed after the Web page is downloaded from the Web server to the client. Internet Explorer can add programmability with either Visual Basic Script or JavaScript, depending on the tastes and skills of the Web page developer, and Active Server Pages has added this same capability to Internet Information Server. A Web page developer can use both Visual Basic Script and JavaScript to add scripting code that's executed by the server, instead of the browser, before the document is transferred across the network. The ability to use the exact same scripting language when developing Web pages that exhibit interactive behavior and customisation allows a developer with modest skills to control the entire operation of an online application. For more information regarding the development of Livtrauma II contact the Web Development Team at SWSAHS.
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