jquery load image to div after clicking href

Question

I know this has been asked many times here, actually I found plenty of questions, each of them with a very good answer, I also followed those answers, used the different ways I found but I still don't get it to work.

What I'm trying to do is to load an image into a div, after clicking a link, instead of redirecting to a new page.

I'm using Pure Css ( http://purecss.io/ ) to create a menu, the menu is made of a list, and each list item has a link inside it, like so:

<div class="pure-menu pure-menu-open" id="vertical-menu">
     <a class="pure-menu-heading">Models</a>
     <ul id="std-menu-items">
         <li class="pure-menu-heading cat">Menu heading</li>
         <li><a href="path_to_image"  class="model-selection">Model 1</a></li>
     </ul>
</div>

In that same html file, I have another div where I want to load the image:

<div id="model-map"></div>

I've tried the following ways, using jquery, in a separate js file:

I followed the selected answer for this question, which seemed to have the best approach ( Can I get the image and load via ajax into div )

$(document).ready(function(){
    console.log("ready"); //this shows on console
    $('.model-selection').click(function () {
        console.log("clicked"); //this doesn't show after clicking
        var url = $(this).attr('href'),
        image = new Image();
        image.src = url;
        image.onload = function () {
            $('#model-map').empty().append(image);
        };
        image.onerror = function () {
            $('#model-map').empty().html('That image is not available.');
        }

        $('#model-map').empty().html('Loading...');

        return false;
    });
});

As you see, the console.log("clicked") never executes, I'll be ashamed if it's something stupid, cause it seems that the function is not handling the click event properly. I get the image of course, but in a new page (default behavior of clicking the href) and I want it to load on the div without being redirected. I hope you can help me. Thanks in advance!

Edit

The code above is working, and both answers are correct, the issue was due to some code inside tags in my html ( YUI code to create the dropdowns for the menu) and it was conflicting with my js file. I moved it to the actual js file and now it works as expected. Thanks!

Answer 1

You need to use event.stopPropagation();

$('.model-selection').click(function( event ) {

    event.stopPropagation();
    // add your code here

});

Answer 2

You just need to prevent the default behavior of moving to a new page for <a> tags, to do this say e.preventDefault() first:

...
$('.model-selection').click(function (e) {
    e.preventDefault(); // Stops the redirect
    console.log("clicked"); // Now this works
    ...
)};
...