Anchor elements in jQueryMobile referring to the same page retain the state

This week I started to learn jQueryMobile and was going through the online documentation that explained the basics. While I was trying out the sample examples, I came across an issue that I thought I’ll share with you. I had posted this on the jQueryMobile forum but I didn’t receive any solution to this. The issue here is when you have two anchor elements with its ‘href’ attribute pointing to the same div (#child data-role=”page”) with one marked as a button and the other marked as a popup dialog, then which ever button you choose first its action will be applied to the other button as well. Say if you click the second button that shows the dialog box containing the page it works fine, but now when you click the first button it shows the dialog box instead of showing it as a page. This is how it works the other way too i.e. if you click the first button the page is shown (as expected), but on clicking the second button it shows the page instead of displaying it as a dialog box.

Here’s the code:

<div data-role="page" id="parent"> <div data-role="header"> <h1>Page Title</h1> </div> <div data-role="content"> <p>Parent page.</p> <a href="#child1" data-role="button"> View page 2 (button)</a> <a href="#child1" data-role="button" data-rel="dialog" data-transition="pop">View page 2 (popup dialog)</a> </div> <div data-role="footer"> <h4>Page Footer</h4> </div> </div> <div data-role="page" id="child1"> <div data-role="header"> <h1>Inside Child page</h1> </div> <div data-role="content"> <p>Inside page 2</p> </div> </div>

As you can see, the two anchor elements point to the same child page with one trying to display it as a page and other as a dialog box. But unfortunately it doesn't work. I'm still new to jQueryMobile and trying to find a solution to this. Although the above example is not a real world use case, but I don't understand why it would fail in first place. Any help is much appreciated.