>Someone else with more experience should confirm this, but I believe the >ready function fires after the HTML is loaded but before the images or >other >binary content is downloaded. I don't believe it has anything to do with >the browser rendering the page or not.
The goal of $(document).ready() is to simply fire as soon as the DOM is available for manipulation. The goal is to try and achieve the same effect as if you put a script tag right before your closing </body> tag in the document. There's no guarantee that this occurs before content is shown to the user or that it would indeed fire before the window.onload event (although in almost all cases it should.) There are some known use cases in which jQuery v1.2.1 and below might not properly trigger the $.ready() function (search the jQuery Trac database for use cases.) If your goal is to make sure that certain content is hidden from the customer until after jQuery has done it's magic, then I recommend using CSS to hide that content and show it once jQuery has processed the block of code you want processed. That's the sure fire way to hide content until the page is done initializing. -Dan
