Scott just pinged me with an interesting question - can you use ColdFusion.navigate with a "normal" div or does it only work with items generated by ColdFusion 8 (cfdiv, cfwindow, cfpod, etc)? We both tested and discovered that - yes - you certainly can use it with a "vanilla" div - but you must get ColdFusion to preload the proper JavaScript files. Consider this simple demo:

<cfajaximport />

<script> function doit() { ColdFusion.navigate('test3.cfm','booger') } </script>

<a href="javaScript:doit()">load the booger</a><br /> <div id="booger"></div>

Starting from the bottom up - the div, booger, is our container. I have a test link above it that runs the doit function. doit() then simply uses ColdFusion.navigate. If you just use that portion of the file, though, you will get a client-side JavaScript error saying that ColdFusion doesn't exist. You need to tell ColdFusion to load the the Ajax libraries. This can be done with a simple, empty cfajaximport tag.

Not sure how useful this is, but if you don't have Spry or jQuery loaded and need a simple and fast way to load data via Ajax, this would work well.