An acronym for “Common Gateway Interface”, CGI is a standard which allows a web server to generate web pages using a programming language as opposed to simply displaying a static document. CGI is used in the creation of interactive sites by allowing for user input and other programmable data to effect the outcome of a generated page. This is configured on the web server and includes the usage of one or more programming languages (e.g. PHP). The use of CGI began mostly as an extension to an otherwise static set of documents like HTML, today it is more common to see a page generated using these methods than not.
