I have ran into a bit of a problem with my understanding of the complete property.
I assumed complete would be true if the image has been downloaded and decoded correctly.
MDN says...
True if the browser has fetched the image, and it is in a supported image type that was decoded without errors.
So, I assumed that checking an image's complete property before its load event had fired would return false (the image has not been fetched). When isolating this in jsFiddle, I kept getting true when checking the property inside a script element just before the closing </body> tag.
I also experimented with changing the src attribute of the image and then immediately checking its complete property. I can see in the browser the complete is coming back as true even before the image has downloaded (I am looking at its progress via the Net panel in Firebug).
Is the behaviour I am expecting correct? Is there a way to get this to work as I expect?
Currently testing in Firefox 7.0.1. This may be a Firefox bug, but only have this other question as evidence.