I'm working on a website that hosts music, pictures, and videos. I currently have 4 pages, a title page, a music page, a video page and an image page. This works well, but I would like to be able to incorporate the ability to play music and look at pictures at the same time. To do this, I created one HTML document with each former page inside a div with a descriptive class name. Then, I wrote a javascript function that shows and hides each div when it is called, so the page acts like it's 4 pages but it isn't. So i embedded the music player in a footer div that stays open as music plays, meaning you can switch back and forth between each media type while keeping the music footer open and playing. This is where the problem lies. When this is done, the image magnifier jquery function I used on my image page no longer works correctly, UNLESS the image div is shown at the beginning when the page opens. It's only then that you can switch between media types and still magnify the pictures. If the title div is shown first (like it's supposed to be), and you go to try and magnify an image, it doesn't work.
At first I thought maybe some of the external javascript libraries were negatively interacting with each other, but then I happened upon what I explained above and now I'm just at a loss as to why the images need to be the first things displayed for the magnifier to work correctly.
The jquery code I'm using is called jQuery Image Magnify and it's made by Dynamic Drive.
Edit: The way that I'm hiding and show div's is with style="display:none" to hide and style="display:block" to show.
Interesting question. Probably because the element needs to be actually visible for the jQuery Image Magnify function to run. I'm willing to bet that plugin uses imageElement.onload for the image magnification handler or something like that, which I think doesn't work if the image element is hidden.
As far as a solution goes, try setting your image to visible at when the page first loads, maybe with left set to -9999 px or something silly like that so it's technically still "visible" but the user can't see it. Then, after the image has loaded and (hopefully) been magnified or whatever the plugin does, move it to be a child of the div its page is supposed to be on and get rid of the negative left value.