When you are doing a search on the intertubes and discover that a website is down for whatever reason, if all you needed was the text from it, you might be tempted to click on google's cached page. This is a terrible terrible mistake which will only lead to suffering on your part.

Here's why:

If that page had images on it hosted on a computer which is also not responding (perchance the same computer), it may take a very long time for the timeouts to..., well,... time out..., during which the text will not be shown by most browsers (unless the images were fully qualified with sizes and the page is relatively uncomplex and your browser isn't an asshole).

Google must, as this is a directive, include an option to remove all img tags and other references.

Yes, I know it is possible to right click/command-click/whatever-click and choose "save page" and edit the tags out and then look at the page. feh!

Alternately, we can turn this into an invention by way of a check box on your browser of choice which will, upon seeing http://209.85.207.104/ (what google is currently pushing cached pages from), will not attempt to load images.
-- ericscottf, Mar 10 2008

Rather than open the page to save it, right-click the a link to the page and "Save Target As...".
-- phoenix, Mar 10 2008


Yeah, that's kinda what I meant. I suppose I wasn't clear on that. Still not very convenient.
-- ericscottf, Mar 10 2008


Update: Google has baked this. When viewing their cache, there is a link in the upper right "text only version"

Someone at Google must spend their 20% personal project time at the HB!
-- ericscottf, Sep 16 2009



random, halfbakery