I don't mean to shamelessly spam my own domain here, but I have been wondering what the hell is up with the two top links on my "MySpace data retention" page. The two 'top' (first-mentioned) links often come up as a webpage displaying the URL of the picture, instead of either the picture or a standard 404 error page. Have any of you ever experienced anything like this? When checking the links on this page (obviously, for my little personal data retention project), I often receive this "error". After a few hard refreshes, it tends to show the picture instead of the URL. For the two top links, I've never achieved a "real" 404 though. For the two other links, most of the time it just keeps on showing the URL - never a 404 and rarely the image. I am immensely confused by this. I don't think I've ever experienced anything like this except with these MySpace pictures. The Facebook pictures just went "404" one day - for a few days after the first "404", sometimes the pictures would still come up after several hard refreshes (despite having cleaned the cache through the browser and BleachBit). The MySpace ones are just being weird as far as I'm concerned, and I'd like to know - or at least get a semi-educated opinion - on why they would do that.
firefox will show the URL of the picture if it can't load the picture (due to timeout or something) and there is no alt-text. i'm guessing that the reason for the picture showing up after refreshes sometimes is due to myspace's CDN. the picture still exists on some servers and has been taken off of others, and sometimes refreshing sends the request to a different server.
Absolutely correct, notatoad. Opera also does that, AFAIK. IE should show the dreaded red-cross-box thing.
That makes perfect sense. I probably should've asked someone sooner instead of staring at the screen going "what!?" Thanks!
