BTW the compact content plugins have been updated with a bunch of small fixes (IE6 benefits the most from this release). See new examples, downloads and changelog for version 3.5.

<link rel="shorturl" href="http://irama.org/673" />

Or if you are using WordPress there are few handy plugins that do this automatically (for example: Short link maker and Shorter links).

So what?

But who’s going to know you’ve gone to all this trouble? How far has support for auto-discovery penetrated? I think it would be great if social media client applications would offer my short URL to users when they choose to shorten URLs within their posts, but I can’t find much documentation about which if any apps will pick up and use short URLs exposed in this way.

Go forth and test

This post can serve as a test, and a collection point for data, leave a comment if you have tested a new client application (include the version if known), and I’ll do the same.

I finished updating the ARIA keyboard navigation plugin tonight.

As of this version the plugin manages focus using tabindex alone, which means it functions in browsers old and new (whether they support ARIA explicitly or not). Browser support has been tested with Firefox 3.6.3, Chrome 4, Safari 4, Opera 10.51 and the Trident Trio (IE 6, 7 and 8).

During the refactoring I also managed to shave ~170 lines from total code weight — and this version has more comments!

Most media query implementations I have seen use px units to define min-width and/or max-width limits. This approach is fine for browsers that zoom, but less than ideal for browsers that don’t. Not a huge issue when you consider that the modern browsers that support media queries all zoom by default! But for transformer layout to retain support for older browsers that don’t zoom, em units would be the way to go.

Firstly, I ran some tests of current browser support for CSS3 media queries using em units, the results were:

• Firefox (3.6.2) and Opera (10) support media queries with em units and load the correct stylesheet after zoom level change.
• Chrome (4) and Safari (4) support media queries with em units but fail to load the correct stylesheet after zoom level change.
• IE (6, 7 and 8 ) do not support media queries at all.

Alexander Farkas has a nice solution for detecting media query support and supplementing for non-supporting browsers but unfortunately it doesn’t support em units or compensate for Safari and Chrome’s insufficient handling of zoom level changes.

The new transformer layout plugin takes Alexander’s great work and rectifies both of those limitations so now it can be used to achieve an approach to layout optimised for all browsers, devices, resolutions, text sizes and zoom levels.

While doing this, I thought I should take the time to document the updated approach I use when creating groups of UI elements for my DHTML projects.

Let me know your thoughts.