I build a simple image upload script in PHP. On the page where the form posts its data to, I used PHP’s built in getimagesize function to get data about the image. What I wanted was the mime-type–for example if it was a JPG, GIF, or PNG–so I could do further processing on it.

For JPG images, the mime type is “img/jpeg”, for GIF–”img/gif”, and so on. Once you know the mime type, you can use PHP’s imagecreatefromjpeg, for example, to create a new image from the JPG file that was uploaded.

So, in my code, if I wanted to do a switch statement based on the image type, it might look something like this:


$image_data = getimagesize($image_file);

switch($image_data['mime']) {
case “image/jpeg”:
// Do code for a JPG image here
break;

case “image/gif”:
// Do code for a GIF image here
break;
}

In most cases, this works perfectly. That is, until you get to Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer interprets the mime type of a JPG image as “image/pjpeg”, breaking your code, breaking the standards, driving you batty, and adding to it’s lengthy list of inexplicable ways of doing things. To fix, you’d simply change the code to:


case "image/jpeg":
case "image/pjpeg":
// Do code for a JPG image here
break;


… and the world is right again.

This blurb was found on the Major League Baseball section of ESPN.com. Headlines are meant to be quickly skimmed and comprehended. We shouldn’t have to read a headline more than a couple of times before we understand the point of the story. Read the offending headline highlighted below, and see how long it takes for you to figure out what it’s talking about.

“Rookie called up after kneecap KO’s 2nd Reds SS.”

Maybe it’s just me, but it took me three reads to figure out that a “rookie short-stop was called up from the minor leagues after two previous short-stops for the Cincinnati Reds had suffered knee-cap injuries.” Granted, that’s a lot to say in 10 words or less, but I think “Kneecap injury sidelines second Reds SS | Rookie called up” would have been better.

If you’re from another country that knows nothing about baseball, you probably wouldn’t be on this site–but if by mistake you had stumbled upon it, you would have no idea what that statement meant. You could look at the other headlines around it and easily infer what was going on with them. Maybe mixing two abbreviations (KO’s and SS) should be a no-no when writing headlines.

Yes, I have more important things to do with my time than to rant on ill-formed headlines, but for the sake of humanity I couldn’t help myself.

In its defense, Firefox may not be entirely to blame. I’m running Leopard on an iMac, and I have two plugins installed, Firebug and Adblock Plus. Your mileage may vary. But, I can count on at least 2 hangs/force-quits a day. I especially notice problems when exiting Gmail, but I don’t think it’s related to Firebug.

I haven’t used Firefox in two-weeks, and having used it since the first beta it feels very weird not to use it now. I’ll still use it to test my web designs across the board, but no more than I’ll use IE6/7 for the same purpose. And I do miss a few features too, like the way it restores my tabs and browsing session if there is a crash, or let’s me undo a tab close (Safari doesn’t do this for me), and I do find Firebug to be a very handy tool when debugging some of my Javascript.

I should be fair and let you know that while I was writing this post, Safari crashed. It happened while I frantically did a cut-copy-paste into a popup window, but I’m guessing it was a clever twist of Firefox irony, letting me know I can’t just depend on one browser–and for the little guy, that’s a good thing.

Maybe I’m missing the point, but we’re supposed to be minimizing, not bloating. Just get to the point without any extra clicks or scrolling.