Rails 3 Link_to :remote is not triggering RJS

I'm working to setup an AJAX action in rails 3 with the following code. The AJAX part of the code seems to work, but it does not request the correct file and my respond_to serves it the regular HTML.

The routing information:

resources :zones do
  resources :records
end

controller:

def new
  @zone = Zone.new
  respond_to do |format|
    format.html
    format.js
  end
end

Link in view (haml):

= link_to 'Add a zone →', new_zone_path, :remote=>true

Generated HTML from link_to (also notice the failed rendering of the html entity...but thats another issue):

<a href="/zones/new" data-remote="true">Add a zone &amp;#8594;</a> 

For kicks, a directory listing of the view/zones. I'm not sure I am doing this quite right, so I have both new.js.rjs and new.rjs. They both have the same content, but are never picked up by the action.

|   `~zones/
|     |-_form.html.haml
|     |-_record.html.haml
|     |-edit.html.haml
|     |-index.html.haml
|     |-new.html.haml
|     |-new.js.rjs
|     |-new.rjs
|     `-show.html.haml

Lastly, the server log from when I click the link:

Started GET "/zones/new" for 127.0.0.1 at Wed Dec 29 00:04:03 -0700 2010
  Processing by ZonesController#new as */*
  User Load (0.4ms)  SELECT "users".* FROM "users" WHERE ("users"."id" = 1) LIMIT 1
Rendered zones/_form.html.haml (22.1ms)
Rendered zones/new.html.haml within layouts/application (34.9ms)
Completed 200 OK in 80ms (Views: 42.0ms | ActiveRecord: 0.4ms)

As you can see, it is rendering the .html file for the request. Now, for testing, I hit the page http://localhost:3000/zones/new.js directly. And it serves up new.js.rjs. Also, the javascript remote call is working. Firebug shows the request and response, but its requesting the wrong page.

Also for testing I did this:

= link_to "Add a zone", '/zones/new.js', :remote=>true

Which works fine (rjs is downloaded and executed and works correctly) for the javascript but it doesn't have the nice failover for javascript-disabled systems.

For what it is worth I am using jquery.

I feel like I am missing something in the routing or the link syntax but all the examples I can find online and in the documentation seem to show exactly what I am doing. Whats the catch?

Thanks.

You need to explicitly tell Rails that you want the js format:

= link_to 'Add a zone →', new_zone_path(:format => :js), :remote=>true

As a way of explanation: You have to specify the .js extension because Rails doesn't discriminate. In many cases, you might want to fetch html or json with Ajax--not just javascript. Rails will let you fetch whatever content in whatever format, which is why you have to specify it.