Download Files: File Formats and Extensions

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When downloading files from the Web, you will undoubtedly encounter many different types of electronic file formats. The way to identify the file type is by looking at its extension, typically expressed as a dot followed by 2 to 4 letters (.xxx). Why should you care? You need to identify the file type to know whether it will work on your computer and whether you will need a particular type of software to decompress, play, or view it. Many sites make files available for both Windows and Macintosh operating systems. Your web browser has the ability to identify and display some, but not all graphic files, and new ones appear all the time. It's helpful to know about the most common Internet file formats, so here's a bit about them. Most files will be either text, graphic, photo, audio or video files. Some may be compressed, others not. The most common compressed files are those with extensions like .ZIP, .SIT and .TAR. These extensions represent popular compression formats for the PC, Macintosh, and UNIX respectively. They may be single files or groups of files that have been bundled together into a single archive. An archive file can contain video or graphics files, and often contains software programs with related documentation. Occasionally you may encounter files with multiple extensions like .tar.gz, which usually means more than one type of software was used to compile and compress the file. The most common graphics file formats on the Web are those with the extensions .jpg and .gif. The .jpg is short for JPEG, which is a popular compression standard for photographs and other images. The .gif extension stands for Graphics Interchange Format, a standard developed by CompuServe in the late 1980s. Both these graphics formats are platform-independent, which means you can view them on a PC, Mac or UNIX computer provided you have a viewer for them. For video, popular extensions are .AVI and .RAM for the PC, .MPG (short for MPEG), which is platform-independent, and .MOV and .QT for QuickTime movies. QuickTime was initially developed by Apple just for the Macintosh, but now plays on Windows and UNIX, too. Popular audio file formats include .MP3 for both Mac and PC and .WMA for the PC. Other file formats include .AIFF for Mac; .AU for Mac and UNIX; .WAV for the PC; and .RA for Real Audio, a proprietary system for delivering and playing streaming audio on the Web. All of the file formats found on the Internet can be broken into one of two types: ASCII format and binary format. ASCII files are text files you can view with any word processor. Binary files contain non-ASCII characters. If you display a binary file on your screen, you will see a lot of strange symbols and characters. TRY THIS... Find it fast by typing the extension into the search box. The following is a guide to common Internet file formats. Next Page  Learn the Net (www.learnthenet.com) is Copyright 1996-2009. Michael Lerner Productions. All Rights Reserved.

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