I have found several other questions here on S.O. (and the web in general) that ask roughly this same question, but the answers always seem to suggest other ways of structuring code that avoid the need for addressing this underlying issue.
For example, many people suggest (and a good suggestion, I agree) to put your code in the jquery load method's callback, on the calling page and not the called page. However I have unique scripts that may appear in certain resources, so I would not want to do that for every load and nor do I necessarily know what these scripts will be.
Here is a test setup to demonstrate what I'm trying to do. The short summary is that when I load partial.htm from main.htm, its script does not fire.
main.htm:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>main file</title>
</head>
<body>
<ul id="links">
<li><a href="somepage1.php">some page1</a></li>
<li><a href="somepage2.aspx">some page 2</a></li>
<li><a href="partial.htm">some other partial page</a></li>
</ul>
<div id="panel" style="display:none; padding:20px; background-color:#CCC;">
LOADED CONTENT WILL GO HERE
</div>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/path/to/jquery-1.3.2.min.js"> </script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(function(){
$('#links a').click(function() {
var $panel = $('#panel');
$panel.show();
$panel.html('Please wait...');
var href = $(this).attr('href');
$('#panel').load(href + ' #content');
return false;
});
});
</script>
</body>
</html>
OK, very simple functionality on this page. Imagine there are many more links, and some of them may require scripting while others do not.
Here is partial.htm:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<title>partial file</title>
</head>
<body>
<div id="content">
<p>Hey, I am the partial file!</p>
<script type="text/javascript">
alert('I am some JS in the partial file! But sadly I do not execute...');
</script>
</div>
<div>
I am some other content on the page that won't be included by jquery.load()...
</div>
</body>
</html>
Notice that my script in partial.htm does not fire. So, my question remains: how to get this to fire, excluding any answers that tell me to put this in the .load() method's callback. (This would be because I may not have the fore-knowledge of which scripts these partial pages may contain or require!)
Thank you!
Update #1:
I suppose an acceptable answer is simply "you can't." However, I'd like to know if this is definitively the case. I haven't been able to find anything that officially states this yet.
Also, when I use firebug to inspect the panel region afterwards, there is no script element present at all. It is as if it is being parsed out by load.
Update #2:
I've narrowed this down to be a problem only when using the selector as part of the href. Loading the entire "somepage.html" will execute the script, but loading "somepage.html #someregion" does not.
$panel.load('somepage.html'); // my script fires!
$panel.load('somepage.html #someregion'); // script does not fire
I'm going to try and hunt down why this may be the case in the jquery source...