title: prototype and jQuery peaceful co-existence?
body: <p>I know very little about JavaScript but despite this I'm trying to cobble something together on my wordpress blog. It's not working, and I don't know how to resolve it, and hey, that's what StackOverflow is for, right?</p>
  
  <p>Firstly, the error message is:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Error: element.dispatchEvent is not a function
  Source File: http://.../wp-includes/js/prototype.js?ver=1.6
  Line: 3936
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>It happens on page load. My page load handler is registered thusly:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Event.observe(window, 'load', show_dates_as_local_time);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The error goes away if I disable some other plugins, and this (plus googling) led me to conclude that it was a conflict between prototype and jQuery (which is used by some of the other plugins).</p>
  
  <p>Secondly I'm following the wordpress recommended practice of using <a href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_enqueue_script" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><code>wp_enqeue_script</code></a> to add a dependency from my JavaScript to the Prototype library, as follows:</p>
  
  <pre><code>add_action( 'wp_print_scripts', 'depo_theme_add_javascript' );
  
  function depo_theme_add_javascript() {
      wp_enqueue_script('friendly_dates', 'javascript/friendly_dates.js', array('prototype'));
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Now I'm also aware that there are some potential conflicts between jQuery and Prototype which are resolved using the jQuery <code>noConflicts</code> method. I've tried calling that from various places but no good. I don't <em>think</em> this is the problem because a) the <code>noConflict</code> function relates solely to the <code>$</code> variable, which doesn't seem to be the problem here, and b) I would <em>expect</em> wordpress to sort it out for me because it can...</p>
  
  <p>Lastly, using the Venkman debugger I've determined that the <code>element</code> referenced in the error message is indeed an <code>HTMLDocument</code> but also does lack a <code>dispatchEvent</code>. Not sure how this could happen, given it's a standard DOM method?</p>