What is the purpose of the JQuery object promise?

Question

For a couple of years, I was dealing with a part time problem where some DOM elements loaded with jquery html function were not accessible immediately after the function cal

Answer 1

The two methods are not related. The reason people often suggest this is because someone found out that they could use .promise().done() to make their code that has a race condition work. It worked for the same reason wrapping the same code in setTimeout(fn, 0) would make it work; it pushes it off to the callback queue to be ran later, likely after the browser performs a render or after some other async callback completes.

.html is synchronous, does not have a callback, and does not need a callback. However, the browser's renderer is asynchronous, so it won't render the change until after the callstack is clear. Using .promise pushes the callback off to the callback queue, thus running the code after a render which resolves the race condition or async logic flaw.

.promise() used on a jquery collection returns a promise that will resolve once all currently running jquery animations are complete. If there are no currently running animations, the promise will resolve immediately and the callback will be pushed to the callback queue to be called once the stack is clear.

It's nothing more than a bandaid. I'd suggest not using it, and instead fixing whatever async logic flaw is causing it to be the solution.