WidgetWidget is a generic term for some arbitrary item, beloved of economists, and used to explain concepts such as marginal or production costs for manufacturing or other processes that produce goods for sale. In the programming languages arena, widget has come to stand for a generic procedure or tool that supplies certain basic functions that programmers can use to construct programs. In the Web world, widget has come to mean some useful graphic, HTML markup fragment, or chunk of CGI code that provides a building block for assembling Web pages. Examples of such widgets include such things as page footers, toolbars (like the one at the head of this page, for instance), or other commonly repeated page elements that, once built, can be used over and over again as a part of basic HTML document layout and structure.