Of course what is early morning where you are is prime time elsewhere. The Web is world wide and used at all hours. Remember, when you are browsing the web you are downloading information so if you are downloading a file and browsing at the same time, the processes will slow each other down. It is the standard file format for exchanging information between genealogy programs. Nearly all genealogy software programs being written today support this standard.
Zip files contain one or more files.
Zip files make it easy to group files and make transporting and copying these files faster. Zip files save time and space, and make downloading software and transferring e-mail attachments faster. It is often useful to send a group of related files to an associate. Rather than distributing individual files it is often easier to distribute the files as an archive to benefit from the file grouping and compression. Some files are important but used infrequently.