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.