jQuery + window.location.hash and same-page anchors - inconsistent behavior?

Question

Consider the following JS code:

<script type="text/javascript">

$(function() {
    // Check if landing on the page with a hash
    if (window.location.hash.length) {
        $('html,body').animate({scrollTop: 200}, 100);
        return false;
    }

    // Same-page anchors
    $('a[href*=#]').click(function() {
        // ... find the target based on the div and animate the scrollTop property again
       }
    });
}); 
</script>

What it does is first check if landing on a page with an #anchor or if the user is clicking an same-page #anchor and simply animate to the target div with the corresponding id.

The problem is that these 2 work alternatively: if you land on a page with a hash symbol the page will animate to the div ID, but the subsequent same-page links won't be intercepted by the bound 'click' event (I've also tried binding it with live(), no difference)

If you land on the page with a clean URL, the links will work again. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Why do you return false? That does not make any sense, because in a "ready" event handler, there is no default behavior that can be prevented or a DOM tree that will be bubbled up. Plus it prevents the following statements from being executed (specifically the binding of the event handlers to the links).

if (window.location.hash.length) {
    $('html,body').animate({scrollTop: 200}, 100);
    return false;  // <-- remove this line!
}