Images
Images are pictures that display inside webpages (as shown in the figure). Right now, these would be JPEG, GIF, and PNG (for more on those formats and what they mean, see the Image basics: formats lesson.
Movies
Movies are videos that display inside webpages (as you can see in the figure), although you can also provide links so visitors can download the movies. For more on video formats and what they mean, see the Movie basics: formats lesson.
Documents
Other files do not display inside webpages, like images and movies do. Instead, inserting other files into webpages actually inserts a link to those files (as shown in the figure).
Examples include:
- PDFs
- Word documents (DOC & DOCX), Excel spreadsheets (XLS & XLSX), and PowerPoint presentations (PPT & PPTX)
- TIFFs, which are images that cannot be displayed inside webpages
- MP3s, M4As and WMAs, which are audio files
- TXT files, which are plain text, without formatting
- There are many more!
When we refer to those in this guide, we’ll simply call them “documents”.
NOTE: Yes, we know that images and movies are also “documents”, but you try coming up with a term for “a file that’s not an image or movie”!