The author writes "Active Server Pages allow for the easy ability to create dynamic views of your data on a web server, but you can also create "static" documents on the server. This can be particularly useful if you wish to distribute your information on CD or in virtually any document form. This sample example will utilize a US state info db. After reading the contents of the db instead of writing output to the browser html text is written to the server on a file with the .xml file extension. By placing appropriate XML tags around the Db output the XML document that is created on the server than can be read by the browser or any appropriate means."