| Text |
|
.html
.txt
.rtf
.doc
.wpd
.pdf
|
HTML document
Text document
Rich text document
MS Word document
Word Perfect document
Portable Document Format |
Web pages
Plain text documents w/o formatting
Text documents w/ formatting, i.e. bold, italics, indention,
File created on Microsoft Word application
File created on WordPerfect
Developed by Adobe to present formatted documents like
forms and reports as these should appear regardless of the viewers monitor
or printer. The Adobe Acrobat Reader is a free software that allows you
to view and print these documents. |
| Images |
|
|
GIF graphic
JPEG graphic
PNG graphic |
Graphic Interchange Format developed by Compuserve
in 1997. Animated (like the rotating apple above) and transparent images
are best examples of this file type.
Developed by the Joint Photographic Experts Group.
Best for colored images like photographs.
Portable Network Graphics. Developed by the W3C
(WWW Consortium) as a completely patent- and license-free format to replace
GIF as world standard. |
| Sound |
|
|
Waveform
MIDI
MPEG Audio Layer 3 |
The de facto sound format for PCs jointly developed by
Microsoft and IBM. Can be played in all Windows applications with sound/audio.
Musical Instrument Digital Interface. Adopted
by the electronic music industry. This powerful tool marries the
synthesizer and computer, and is understandably very popular among composers
and computer enthusiasts alike since its inception in 1982.
Where the MIDI is popular, MP3 music is controversial
because it enables users (mostly teenagers) to freely download and share
copyrighted music through the Internet. |
| Video |
|
|
Audio Video Interleave
QuickTime
MPEG |
Audio Video Interleave, designed by Microsoft
for Windows as video equivalent of wav.
Video and animation system developed by Apple but which
also run on PCs. A lot of educational games on CD come with QuickTime software
to run the animation sequences.
Moving Pictures Experts Group. A family of digital
audio-video compression standards and file formats that includes MPEG 1
and MPEG 2. The latter is used in DVD-ROMs. |
| Others |
|
|
Executable Files
Compressed Files |
A self-extracting file that runs as a program in your
computer. You activate it either by selecting the Run
command or by simply double-clicking on the icon. Most free downloads from
the Web like games, cartoons, freeware ... also viruses and worms.
Large files are often compressed to save disk space,
bandwidth, and download time. that you need to unzip using a software
like WinZip or Netzip, after downloading from the Internet. Zip files could
be anything but are usually exe files, graphics, and FTP files. |
