Why won't this particular setup print this particular webpage?

"Good morning, Mr. Phelps."

(For those of you too young to catch that reference, that was the
greeting the disembodied voice on the soon-to-self-destruct mission
assignment tape offered to "Mission: Impossible" star Peter Graves at
the start of each episode.)

Anyway, your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to explain
why my HP Deskjet D1420, installed on a MacBook Pro running OS X
10.4.11, can't print out the following webpage from Firefox 2.0.0.20:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1404451/fullcredits#cast

(OK, OK, so I've never gotten over my crush on Teri Hatcher.)

Here's what happens, or doesn't: When I have the page up, I can
either hit the print icon or go the File-Print route in Firefox and
the job appears to spool normally, but the printer never responds, the
job disappearing as if it went through sucessfully without leaving any
error messages in its wake. I have an ancient desktop computer with a
not-much-newer Canon printer attached that I CAN print the page to
over the network, so whatever is wrong is specific to the HP in its
effect, regardless of which component is actually responsible.

I tried saving the page to my computer but the HP still wouldn't print
it.

Again, since I was able to use another printer this is more of an
annoyance than anything else, but I'm curious. I'd really like to
find out what's causing this. It's intriguing that a printer this new
can handle anything else on the web and choke on this particular page,
while a printer Lincoln could have used on his way to Gettysburg (it's
an old BJC-50 with the battery, so he really COULD have used it if it
had been charged before going into the time machine) doesn't have any
problem with it. I'm betting that some of you HTML and printer driver
experts will be intrigued as well.

Oops-I almost forgot: "As always, should you or any member of your IM
force be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of
your actions."

On 18-May-2009, spammenot@mailinator.com wrote:

> Again, since I was able to use another printer this is more of an
> annoyance than anything else, but I'm curious. I'd really like to
> find out what's causing this.

Not enough print buffer to accomodate the page?
In some cases the whole ppage has to fit into the printers
memory before it can be formatted and printed.