VBScript
Leveraging Visual Basic for Intranets
By Gary Cornell
VBScript enjoys many advantages over the various flavors of JavaScript, the foremost of which is an installed base of millions of Visual Basic programmers. Other pluses include its lack of case-sensitivity (which is like Visual Basic and HTML, but unlike JavaScript) and its easy-to-understand syntax, which favors keywords as opposed to JavaScript's more cryptic C-style approach. Finally, programming event-driven Dynamic HTML with VBScript follows the Visual Basic event-driven programming model. VBScript is the default language for Active Server Pages (ASP) and works extremely well with ActiveX controls, of course.
And now, the bad news: Netscape browsers do not support VBScript natively. (There is a plug-in from NCompass labs, but until recently, there has been no support for Netscape 4.0, and it adds extra cost.) Moreover, without the NCompass plug-in, even Netscape's WinTel-based browsers do not support ActiveX controls (although they are a binary standard that can run on any Win32 platform). Also, ActiveX controls have security problems because their security model is based only on signing, which is less secure than the three-pronged approach (signing, Virtual Machine checks, and security-manager class) used by Java applets and Beans.
Yet you may still want to consider using VBScript to design Web pages for a WinTel 32-based intranet that uses Internet Explorer or an NT-based IIS server using Active Server Pages. For an intranet, code signing provides sufficient security, and if security and platform independence is not an issue, the power and ease ActiveX controls bring is hard to beat.
