I’ve been working on a side project in rails that uses AJAX for all posts to the server with JQuery BBQ as state management (using the hashchanged event to provide bookmarkable views) and ran into a problem that can happen to anyone using JQuery. When AJAX calls are placed, they often retrieve HTML that contains script tags in it and then place this HTML into the calling page’s DOM. The problem is that usually one can use JQuery’s ready event to wait for the document to finish loading before accessing objects in those scripts. However when a Webkit based browser (such as Google Chrome) loads this content, it doesn’t wait for the scripts to load before firing the ready event. In my case I was implementing ReCaptcha for image verification of users signing up for my site and the JavaScript provided by them was getting inserted into my registration page via AJAX.
After massaging Google keywords to find the right query and paging through several results, I found a post with a great solution. Basically this code parses your HTML on the client for script tags and loads them separately before returning from the function. I’m now using it anywhere I inject code into the page that has SCRIPT tags via AJAX.