A method by which the presentation of superfluous media content requiring system activity is reduced or suspended in consideration of system power. For one embodiment, a user processing system indicates its power mode to a power mode/level determination applet embedded on a Web page. Action items within the web page respond to DC powered systems by limiting speed and/or the duration of animation for animated objects within the Web page. Additionally, or alternatively, the limitation or suspension of animation may be in response to power level. For one embodiment the superfluous media content is reduced or suspended after some period regardless of system power considerations.

In order to reduce overall downloading time for Web documents without depriving the user of valuable Web document resources, the user at a receiving Web station is enabled to preselect which received Web documents will be downloaded in a text-only mode. An implementation is provided at the receiving Web station for determining whether a received web document has been preselected for downloading in a text-only mode, and in responsive to this determination, there is an implementation for downloading such received preselected Web documents in a text-only mode. The user is enabled not only to designate specified documents to be downloaded in a text-only mode but the user may also preselect whole World Wide Web domains or specified Web sites within such domains from which received Web documents are to be downloaded in a text-only mode.

An advertisement system and method are provided for inserting into an end user communication message a background reference to an advertisement. In some embodiments, the background reference causes an advertisement image to be tiled, or watermarked, across an end user screen behind the text of an e-mail message or public posting. A message server inserts the background reference after receiving a message originally sent from an end user originator and before sending the message to be delivered to an end user recipient. When necessary, the message server will convert at least a portion of the message into a proper format, such as HTML, before inserting the background reference to an advertisement, which is preferably selected in accordance with end user recipient demographic information and/or ad exposure statistics. The advertisement itself, often a graphical file, is preferably not transmitted with the message, but is typically stored at the message server or other location remote from the end user recipient. Preferably, the message server maintains and refer to records on each end user recipient to allow for selective enablement of background reference insertion and overwriting based upon end user preferences. According to various "non-web" example embodiments, the message server transmits an SMTP, POP3 or NNTP message with an HTML portion for a respective HTML-compatible client. In other "web-based" example embodiments, the message server transmits the entire message in HTML to be used as a stand-alone web page or as a portion of a larger page employing frames or tables.

A method of building and assembling programs across computer networks that is dictated by the user to perform logical work without the user using a compiler. Users are able to assemble programs over a network by defining or re-defining which logical components are bound into the overall program without the use of a compiler. Logical components are called and bound into the program at run time, allowing dynamic programming which may be modified at any time without re-compiling the entire program. Each logical component can act independently of other logical components or work in concert with each other. This allows assembly of a program, even though some components may be created using totally different methodologies and/or are constructed by different programmers.

A method and apparatus for selectively downloading components over the World-Wide-Web is provided. The preferred embodiment uses a download selection mechanism to display a download selection list to a web browser user. The list allows web user to decide which components to download and which to not download, thereby giving the web user more control over the speed of their Internet accesses. The preferred method produces a table or chart of components and allows the web user to select which components are downloaded.