Web design terminology beginning with the letter C

Common Gateway Interface (CGI)

From a web design point of view, a CGI is a program that can take data from a web server and perform an action with it - for example turning a submitted web form into an email.

CGI scripts can be written by web developers to perform a number of interactive actions. These are usually written in languages such as Perl, C or C++, but there are many others.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

Cascading Style Sheets are a a (HTML) specification that allows the web developer to use codes to describe how a pages contents should look. In particular it is used for styling and laying out text, paragraphs and headings.

One useful feature of CSS is that the styles themselves can be defined in an external document and simply referred to in the actual HTML page. This allows for a faster download and display of formatted text.

Cold Fusion

A dynamic web page server application from Macromedia, used for serving database generated web pages.

Cross Browser Compatibility

Cross-browser compatibility is the aim of most web developers. The aim is to ensue that the look and functionality of the web site is as similar as possible across as many web browsers as possible

This is often an easier concept to aim for than it is to achieve as the number of browsers grows across different operating systems. In practice, many web designers will agree with the client beforehand as to which browsers the web site must be compatible with.