Software and Web Development Glossary

Description

Index Software and web development glossary

A plain-English glossary of the technical terms that turn up in software proposals, quotes and audits. Each entry gives a one-sentence definition, an everyday example, what the term changes when you are paying for software, and the related terms. Definitions of web standards are checked against the primary source and dated.

Talk to a technology expert Last updated 2 October 2026

Who this is for

You have a proposal, a quote or an audit in front of you, and it uses a word nobody has explained. Each entry here answers three questions in a few hundred words: what the term means, what it looks like in a business you would recognise, and what it changes about the thing you are buying.

How each entry is written

The definition comes first , in one sentence you could repeat to a colleague.

One example , using a situation such as a payment, an order or a product page, not an abstract diagram.

Why it matters when you commission software : the questions the term should prompt you to ask a developer, including the cases where the honest answer is that you do not need it.

Related terms , linked where they have their own entry.

Where a term is a web standard or a metric with a published definition, the entry follows the body that defines it, such as MDN, the W3C, schema.org or web.dev, and lists the source with the date it was read. Thresholds and metric sets change; the date on each entry tells you how fresh it is.

How the entries are grouped

Entries are grouped by where you are likely to meet the term: connecting systems together, selling online, artificial intelligence, the web platform itself, and being found in search and in AI answers. The other pages on this site link to these entries in place of re-explaining a term each time, so a definition means the same thing wherever you meet it.

Integrations

API An API is the set of rules one piece of software uses to ask another for data or an action. A plain payment-gateway example, and what to ask when a quote says 'API integration'.

Webhook A webhook is a message one system sends to another the moment something happens. What it is, how it differs from an API call, and why it matters for payments and messaging.

Commerce

Headless commerce Headless commerce separates the storefront customers see from the commerce engine behind it. What that means, what it costs you in upkeep, and who should not use it.

AI

RAG RAG is a way of making an AI assistant answer from your own documents: it looks up the relevant passages first, then writes the answer from them. Definition, example, limits.

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