Hour 19. Access and the Internet

The Internet is part of our everyday lives, and the Internet has penetrated into the life of Access developers. You can save almost every Access 2003 object as an Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or Extensible Markup Language (XML) document. Furthermore, Access 2000 introduced a new object type called data access pages. Using data access pages, you can quickly and easily create a Web view of data. Data access pages are extremely flexible and scalable. You can create the simplest data access page as easily as you can create any Access form. On the other hand, by using the Microsoft Script Editor (MSE), you can turn data access pages into powerful Web pages. Probably the biggest downside of data access pages is that you must view them on a machine that has Internet Explorer 5 or above and that has Microsoft Office installed. This makes data access pages an excellent candidate for intranet applications but not for Internet applications.

This hour covers several topics that relate to Access and its tight integration with the Internet:

• Exporting to and importing from HTML

• Exporting to and importing from XML

• Working with data access pages