The hub painted the lead news image as a CSS background straight from the source's
hotlinked URL — one transient failure (slow/rate-limited third-party CDN) left a
blank plate until you refreshed and the browser served it from cache. Now the probe
that already runs for cover-vs-figure detection gates the photo: load with up to two
retries (0.5s/1s backoff), reveal the plate only once it's truly loaded (and cached),
and otherwise keep the typographic topic cover. Soft fade-in on arrival; reduced-motion
honored. No more blank-until-refresh.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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