Mostly every core functions can be ran without prior element verification.

So instead of;

if ($('#el').length) {

$('#el').show();

}

It's possible to just do;

$('#el').show();

We know that if "#el" is non-existent, the show method wont be called. So far so good.

But if we do this;

$('#el').load('somefile');

If #el is non-existent the Ajax request is performed anyway, thus making it mandatory to write something like this instead;

if ($('#el').length) {

$('#el').load('somefile');

}

In this regard, I think this behavior is counter intuitive and inconsistent with other functions.

There might be good reasons why one would want to perform a Ajax requests to load HTML into a non-existent element, but it's beyond my understanding.