In this video,
we'll examine what web media actually is and how it differs from
other forms of content you'll encounter on the web.
The term web media can be mostly interchanged with another
term that you have heard of, digital media.
They're mostly the same and refer to any electronic digital data
that is machine‑readable, nontext‑based data.
When we say that web media is nontext‑based,
you can think of it as really anything that is binary and digital
in nature. When we download the HTML of a web page, it is clear
that although it is meant to be readable by a machine as a markup
language and used to display information on a web page, it is
nonetheless text based, and it is indeed human readable.
Although we can see in our web page HTML markup that there's an image
to display, when we actually look inside that file,
what we see is not decipherable to the human eye and only makes sense
to a machine that knows the specific file format,
how to read it, and what to do with it and, in the case of this web media image,
ultimately,
how to display. At its simplest, we can say that the key differences
between web media and text data are that, in general,
web media is not designed to be human readable, web
media is usually referred to in HTML,
but not directly embedded in the page source, and web media generally
requires special processing in order to make use of it.
One of the key things to remember about web media is that although we
normally think of simple groupings like images,
video, and audio,
for example, within each of these media groups are
further subgroups of other media types.
These different types cover different display standards,
different screen resolution formats,
file encodings that may or may not have limitations
on use due to file protection, maybe including digital rights management,
or may require you, for example,
to have special device drivers installed and encoders to even be
able to interact with the media in the first place. You can find
out a lot about the requirements for working with a particular
media file by examining its content type, and we learn more about
that later in the course.