We’ve already looked at client-side scripting—that is, scripts that in a web page that are executed by the browser—in Programming Windows: Hello, HTML (Premium) and Programming Windows: Hello, JavaScript (Premium). In both cases, the scripting language was JavaScript, which was and still is broadly supported in all web browsers. JavaScript is a standard and the lingua franca of the web, and it is inarguably the single most popular programming language in the world.

But in 1996, Microsoft was still pushing to embrace the Internet across all of its product lines, and it embraced and extended JavaScript in two ways, with its own version called Jscript, which was largely compatible with the original language, and with VBScript, which was based on a version of the Visual Basic language called Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).