How to populate option list from database

[mlesniak]

Hi. I've been trying to populate a <select> option list in HTML by querying a Microsoft SQL Server database. For some reason I can not do this by mixing the scripting code (VBscript) with HTML.
If I place the query between the <select> and </select> tags it does not run as expected. But I can place (almost) the same code in a file with an ASP extension and it will list the data correctly.
The only way I can see to do it is to write the whole web page/form in vbscript but that means converting " to chr(34) and so on. That makes the code very cumbersome and difficult to maintain. There is also a moderate amount of html code to convert to vbscript too.
Sorry, I haven't included the actual code because I am not at the location where I am developing the application. There is also a fair amount of code and I wanted to make this as concise as possible.