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Today's Internet clients vary widely with respect to both hardware and software properties: screen size, color depth, effective bandwidth, processing power, and the ability to handle different data formats. The order-of-magnitude span of this variation is too large to hide at the network level, making application-level techniques necessary. We show that on-the-fly adaptation by transformational proxies is a widely applicable, cost-effective, and flexible technique for addressing all these types of variations. To support this claim, we describe our experience with data-type-specific distillation (lossy compression) in a variety of applications. We also argue that placing adaptation machinery in the network infrastructure, rather than inserting it into end servers, enables incremental deployment and amortization of operating costs. To this end, we describe a programming model for large-scale interactive Internet services and a …