Retained mode
A UI or graphics approach where the application builds a lasting model of the scene that the library keeps, and you mutate that model rather than redrawing everything by hand.
The program states what should exist — "a button here, a list there" — and the library keeps the objects alive, works out what changed and redraws only that. The web's DOM, Qt, WPF, SVG and a scene graph are all retained mode. The upside is that the library can optimise redraw, hit-testing and layout centrally; the downside is more state to keep in sync between model and application.
The term comes from graphics, where it stands against immediate mode. Microsoft's Direct3D long shipped a "Retained Mode" layer on top of the raw API, but it was abandoned around DirectX 7 (1999) — for most games the extra abstraction was more hindrance than help.