When the World Wide Web debuted in 1991, Web pages were basic: text only, black on gray. Developers have since added animation, sound, video and interactivity using new programming languages, like Java, and file formats, like RealAudio. To allow Web browsers to handle all these languages and file types, software modules called "plug-ins" have proliferated; there are now more than 140. The result: a Tower of Babel for Web developers. And because the burden of negotiating among all these languages and file formats falls largely to network servers, downloads can slow to a crawl.

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