Yes, educational as you say. node.href just returns an empty text/html document when fetched. Does this happen synchronously or not? What do browsers do when

Yes, educational as you say. node.href just returns an empty text/html document when fetched. Does this happen synchronously or not? What do browsers do when they're given text/html as the content of an image and what do the specs define they do? When is ping freed? Is it automatic when it goes out of scope and does that suggest that the image fetch is synchronous?