C
Cache
Pronounced cash, a special high-speed storage mechanism. It can be either a reserved section of main memory or an independent high-speed storage device. Your browser has a cache in it to store the pages you have looked at.
CERN
European Particle Physics Laboratory, the developers of the World Wide Web.
CGI (Common Gateway Interface)
The scripting language used to write gateway scripts for CERN and NCSA web servers. CGI programs are the most common way for web servers to interact dynamically with users. Many HTML pages that contain forms, for example, use a CGI program to process the form's data once it's submitted.
Chat
Real-time communication between two users via computer. Once a chat has been initiated, either user can enter text by typing on the keyboard and the entered text will appear on the other user's monitor.
Cisco
One of the leading manufacturers of network equipment. Cisco's primary business is in Internet working products, such as routers, bridges, and switches.
Click-through Rate
In web advertising, the click through rate is the number of clicks on an advertisement (such as a banner ad) is expressed as a percentage of the number of times that the page where the ad appears was downloaded. Thus, the click through rate would be 10% if one in ten people who viewed the advertisement clicked on it, and landed on the advertisers' site.
Client/Server Architecture
A network architecture in which each computer or process on the network is either a client or a server. Servers are powerful computers dedicated to managing disk drives (file servers), printers (print servers), or network traffic (network servers). Clients are PCs or workstations on which users run applications. Clients rely on servers for resources, such as files, devices, and even processing power.
Co-located Server
Some companies own a server, but want to locate it in the secure environment of a web hosting provider. That way they can take advantage of the fastest possible connections to the Internet while handing over day-to-day management of the site.
Connectivity
A computer buzzword that refers to a program or device's ability to link with other programs and devices.
Cookies
A message given to a web browser by a web server. The browser stores the message in a text file called cookie.txt. The message is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server.