а так работает?
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>title</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(function(){
alert(1);
$('#button').click(function(){
alert(2);
});
});
</script>
</head>
<body>
<form>
<input id="button" type="button">
</form>
</body>
</html>