Skimming Wikipedia and RFC 3875, it seems like there was never a notion of a “common gateway” that needed an interface. The name suggests to me that there were

Skimming Wikipedia and RFC 3875, it seems like there was never a notion of a “common gateway” that needed an interface. The name suggests to me that there were many ways forms of “gateway interfaces” between web servers and executables, and the standard was to pick a common one. In general, it seems English doesn’t try to make a distinction. Is a small, red bird a small bird that’s red or a red bird that’s small? Same difference, and in fact the standard ordering of adjectives (1) would preclude such a distinction from being possible. (1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjective#order https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjective#order