Foamcow,
You are correct that my question was geared to find out if it was possible to pull in data from ANY file without having to use ANY server side thing. I am new to ASP (as in I haven't yet created an ASP that works) so I don't know how to do it. It's not writing the page that's the problem but how to test it.
My whole project is to create a web site for a non-profit group that has no money for development. Since I'm part of that group, they are willing to wait while I figure out how to do it. I don't have a host for the web site yet (doesn't seem to make sense to spend money on a host until I am ready to roll out a site that can actually be visited).
The site has many HTML pages that seem to work well (testing them using the HTML editor and IE), but an ASP page is needed.
I'm working on a machine with Windows 2000 and I am told by my system administrator that IIS is installed on the machine, but I don't know where to go from there. How do I run IIS. How do I tell my ASP to use IIS to go and connect to a file or a database. The tutorials available on the web have lots of nice info on how to create the page, but nobody gives a step-by-step of how to test an ASP by connecting through IIS.
If you could tell me or recommend a source that will tell me how to get my ASP page to use the machine's IIS to connect to a dB, that would probably solve my problem.
Thanks for your time.