When you think back on it, this was the true genius behind RSS aggregators. I could still read your blog when your blog was not working, because Google Reader (or your favorite aggregator) had already downloaded it once. It's too bad that RSS died.
True. However this specific type of failure should be relatively rare. I expect most of my outages to be either network issues or a powered off machine (TCP timeout) or the web service is not running (TCP RST). Accepting a connection and not replying is just rare for something as dumb as an HTTP request for a static file.