The Software Development Forum audience in the Palo Alto, Calif., Cubberly community center was one tough crowd. Before attempting to sell the hard-core programmers on his groundbreaking Curl software, Brent Young made sure his company's pedigree was high in his PowerPoint display. There on the second slide, listed as a founder, was "Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of World Wide Web."

"HTML is good for what it does. Java is good for what it does," Young declared. "What the Web needs is a merger of the two." Curl, he claimed, will deliver everything these ubiquitous Internet languages offer and more.

The audience, about 60 strong, was skeptical, Berners-Lee or no. "Another bid by MIT's failed linguists to produce yet another language," one programmer, Brian Topping, scoffed.

By the time Young had finished, though, the techies had come around. His demo, a Web application recently deployed by electronics company Siemens, was a graphically rich and interactive financial analysis tool with the fast, smooth performance of a desktop app. At the end of the session, Topping was among the crowd of programmers that mobbed Young, eager to learn more.

Curl's ubergeeks have created a programming language they claim encompasses everything HTML and Java can do, along with a browser plug-in to deliver Web content, à la Macromedia's Flash. Aiming to re-engineer the Web, they face an array of entrenched technologies. But investors have bet $52 million on its potential.

The Curl technology emerged from an MIT research project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, the government agency that gave birth to the Internet. In 1998, with the project completed, several team members launched Curl in Cambridge, Mass., MIT's hometown. Brent's father, Bob Young, whose background is corporate financing, came in as CEO. Twelve MIT-connected founders, including Berners-Lee, put up the initial $1 million.

Curl addresses a core problem of the Net: It's a programming muddle. Basic Web pages are coded in HTML. Interactivity on a Web page - such as forms that visitors fill in or a shopping cart - demands a quantum leap in programming ability, to JavaScript or the equivalent. To create richer content, such as animation, requires Flash or a truly complex language such as Java or C++. Maintaining a Web site that mixes these technologies can be a nightmare.