Abstract

luding screen size, color depth, effective bandwidth, processing power, and ability to handle specific data encodings, e.g., GIF, PostScript, or MPEG. As shown in tables 1 and 2, each type of variation often spans orders of magnitude. High-volume devices such as smart phones [12] and smart two-way pagers will soon constitute an increasing fraction of Internet clients, making the variation even more pronounced. These conditions make it difficult for servers to provide a level of service that is appropriate for every client. Application-level adaptation is required to provide a meaningful Internet experience across the range of client capabilities. Although we expect clients to improve over time, there will always be older systems still in use that represent relatively obsolete clients, and the high end will advance roughly in parallel with the low end, effectively maintaining a gap between the two: there will always be a large difference between the very best laptop and t

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