isr.co.ro : glossary (CGI) Common Gateway Interface The standard method for connecting the programs that provide pages for the World Wide Web and routines that read and process any data the user supplies in response. CGI programs run on a server and must be compatible with whatever operating system and application framework the server provides. Because only obscure scripting languages, such as Perl, were supported in the first years of the Web, CGI programming is still considered a specialized art. These days CGI programs can be written in a growing number of languages and with a growing number of authoring tools. Web users generally hear about CGI only when something goes wrong. More loosely, a program written according to the CGI standard. As in, "she wrote a CGI for us that solved all our data collection problems."