I thought flash was supposed to be a solution to all our cross-browser woes. Alas, nothing is ever so simple.

I’m trying to detect a well-formed but unavailable url (eg. when you’re server goes down) using the HTTPStatusEvent.

it simply reflects the HTTP status code (if any) that is provided by the networking stack.

“Perfect!” I think to myself. Then… FAIL:

Some Flash Player environments may be unable to detect HTTP status codes

And by “some” they mean “everything except IE running on Windows”. All other browsers fail to feed the flash player itself the status codes so they all dispatch values of zero.
Looks like its time to take the train to timeout town… (sorry)