Looking through the source, I see that the "textStatus" parameter of $.ajax's error callback can be one of the following values:
* timeout - when your specified timeout is exceeded * error - http error, like 404 * notmodified - when requested resource was not modified since last request * parsererror - when an xml/json response is bad I would like it if this was in the documentation for $.ajax and $.ajaxError - I didn't realize those statuses were being provided by jQuery, and I don't think I could have found out about them without reading the source.