title: jQuery $('#form').submit() doesn't do anything
body: <p>I have a rather basic form (using the POST method) that I want to submit when the user clicks on a link (outside said form). I also have a submit button in the form, which works perfectly, so it's not a problem with the form per se.</p>
  
  <p>Basically, what I have is (simplified, obviously):</p>
  
  <p>HTML</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;form method="post" id="searchForm" action="[absolute https URL]"&gt;
  &lt;!-- (some text fields, checkboxes, select elms, hidden fields, a submit button) --&gt;
  &lt;/form&gt;
  
  &lt;a href="#" class="close"&gt;Confirm&lt;/a&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>JS</p>
  
  <pre><code>} else if ($(e.target).is('a.close')) {
      // do some stuff (&lt;- this works)
      // ...
      // then submit form
      $('#searchForm').submit(); // &lt;- no effect
      // $('#searchForm').trigger('submit'); // also no effect
      // document.forms['searchForm'].submit(); // still nothing
  
      console.log($('#searchForm')); // &lt;- this works
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>My problem is: the .submit(); line doesn't seem to do anything. The form isn't submitted (the page doesn't even reload), and no error appear in the browser console either. I know the code is triggered when clicking the link because of the console.log inside it (which also confirms that the form element is found (length 1)).</p>
  
  <p>There's no other form on the page, and no other element with the id "searchForm". As far as I can tell, no event handler is bound to the form element.</p>
  
  <p>What am I missing? What should I check for?</p>