HEAD request appears to be to transmitting resource, not just headers

Question

It appears that the HEAD requests I'm sending via jQuery's $.ajax({...}); method, are returning the content of the given resource (at least in Firefox... IE appears to function normally), rather than just headers. I'm trying to capture only the Content-Length header property, for use in an image preloader, though it seems that by merely querying for the Content-Length, it's downloaded the content itself.

The order of operation here, is:

• Find all elements in a given page with CSS background-image, and populate an array (imageTemp) with the URLs.
• For each image URL, perform an Ajax HEAD request, to obtain the Content-Length and add that to bytesTotal as well as populate the array (imageData) with both the URL and that image's Content-Length.
  • Simultaneously, start a setInterval event handler to periodically check whether or not all of the Ajax HEAD requests have completed.
• When the HEAD requests have completed, begin loading the images into Image() objects from imageData, adding the associated image Content-Length value to the bytesLoaded value.\
• When bytesLoaded == bytesTotal images are done loading, and the preloader has completed.

Here is my script as of currently:

(function($){

    var callbacks = {
        initiate: function(){},
        progress: function(percent){},
        complete: function(){},
    };

    var imageTemp = Array();
    var imageData = Array();
    var imageCurrent = null;
    var intervalId = 0;
    var bytesLoaded = 0;
    var bytesTotal = 0;

    $.preloader = function(arguments){

        for(var arg in arguments){
            callbacks[arg] = arguments[arg];
        }

        callbacks.initiate();
        $('*')
            .each(function(index){
                if($(this).css('background-image') != 'none'){
                    imageTemp.push($(this).css('background-image').slice(5, -2));
                }
            });

        intervalId = window.setInterval(function(e){

            if(imageData.length == imageTemp.length){
                window.clearInterval(intervalId);

                for(var i = 0; i < imageData.length; i++){

                    (function(imageIndex){
                        currentImage = new Image();
                        currentImage.src = imageData[imageIndex][0];
                        currentImage.onload = function(e){
                            bytesLoaded += parseInt(imageData[imageIndex][1]);
                            callbacks.progress(bytesLoaded/bytesTotal);
                            if(bytesLoaded >= bytesTotal){
                                callbacks.complete();
                            }
                        };
                    })(i);

                }

            }

        }, 1);

        for(var i = 0; i < imageTemp.length; i++){
            (function(i){
                $.ajax({
                    type: "HEAD",
                    async: true,
                    url: imageTemp[i],
                    success: function(message, text, response){
                        var bytes = parseInt(response.getResponseHeader('Content-Length'));
                        bytesTotal += bytes;
                        imageData.push([imageTemp[i], bytes]);
                    },
                });
            })(i);
        }

    };

})(jQuery);

This is directly associated with my question over at Ajax HEAD request via Javascript/jQuery, but it certainly not a duplicate, as the issue has extended from the previously solved question.

Answer 1

I encourage you to set up Fiddler (or some other HTTP packet sniffer) and see what is actually going through the wire - exact requests sent and exact response received. This will help you troubleshoot whether the problem is on the server or the client.