About the only things available for client-side use are Internet Explorer's Tabular Data Control and (I think) an XML data control of some sort.
TDC is installed with IE.
What TDC allows you to do is use ADO recordsets and data binding in your DHTML page to get access to a text file on the server. The text file is in a delimited text format, using commas, tabs, or what have you.
The text file is read-only of course, but TDC permits you to make a very interactive web page. For small amounts of information (less than 25K) TDC is quite responsive.
You can search on keys, filter on values, sort, and do just about anything a recordset can do. You can use data-bound tables and a TDC to make a pretty interactive, pageable tablular display of information.
I've even used data-bound tables and the MSChart control with TDC to display things like web-page usage week by week for an ASP information retrieval application (internal vs. external users by hour by day, hits vs. misses by hour by day). Of course the delimited text file containing the stats was created "behind the scenes" by server log analysis.
You can find out more about TDC by going to
and searching on TDC and "tabular data control" there.
I don't know much about the XML data control, but I think this was the same idea, just using an read-only XML file instead of delimited text.
The other reason ADO exists on the client side at all has to do with two other technologies:
* Remote Data Service - an IIS feature that allows IIS to mediate in database access by a client page, to a database on the server. Most sites lock this down because there are a few hacker exploits related to it. Also it requires IIS at the server - and I don't think it works with Access (you need a client/server DB like SQL Server - not a file DB like Access).
* HTML Applications (or HTAs). This is an application made up of DHTML that can run as a local application - just like an EXE on the user's machine. Most of the security restrictions are lifted for HTAs, allowing your HTA application to freely access files and databases on the local machine. There are DHTML applications where the file ends in .HTA instead of .HTM