One of the most interesting aspects of the WWW¹ is the seemingly unlimited freedom one has in viewing pages. While there are many sites that require membership or the securing of some access privileges, many are free for the viewing. The same is true for the content of WWW pages. The words and images that appear on pages are sometimes restricted by copyright² laws, but often are available for - and easy to - download to your computer so that your can use them for your own (legal) purposes.

Downloading an image or sound file, for example, in most modern browsers³ is simply a matter of clicking the right combination of mouse buttons. Doing so will provide you with your own copy of the file⁴ describing the image, sound, or other multimedia object. Files can also be borrowed (that is, you can save the name of the file so that it can be referenced from one of your pages), but doing so does not give you a local copy. Ask your instructor how these downloading/file referencing operations are accomplished on your machine/browser, and do the following.

1. Download two images that you think you might like to incorporate into a personal home page (We'll show you how to make the page in the lab exercises for Module 4. For now, just collect the images, and save them on one of your disks.)
2. Copy and save a link to a sound file that can be added to any page of your own devising.

As you may have noticed, files describing things like images and sounds - exactly the types of files that one often wants to download - tend to be huge. Indeed, the noticeable delays that you may have encountered in the exercise above stem from the sizes of the files involved, and the time it takes to transmit them.

To facilitate all types of file transfer, programs have been developed which effectively shrink wrap a file (compress⁵, stuff, or zip it) so that it takes up as little space as possible. Complementary programs are, of course, available for expanding/unstuffing/unzipping files once they have arrived at their destination machines. You will, again, have to rely on your instructor (or, you can refer to our list of online resources for this module) to determine how best to expand a compressed file once it is delivered to your machine. When you are ready to try it out, do the following.

3. Click here to download a single file containing a collection of images and sounds that we will use in subsequent lab exercises. Once the file is on your machine, you will have to expand it to view and use the individual files therein. Expand the file now, and save the images on a personal disk for later use.