Detecting visited sites with jQuery

My recent adventure in writing a jQuery plugin led to me considering what other notionally unattainable client-side information could be gathered using a bit of Javascript and CSS manipulation. A bit of playing, (and a lot of understanding Safari’s rather greedy method of storing styles) has resulted in my second jQuery plugin in as many months.

With the same disclaimers about elegance and infallibility, this plugin allows you to test a user’s browser history against specific URL, returning a true/false value if they have visited the site in question.

if ($.history.test('http://www.flickrshow.com')) {
  alert('You tasteful bugger.');
}

Much like my previous effort, this plugin works by creating an HTML element, in this case an <a> tag, and some associated CSS properties to alter the element in a measurable way. In this case, by adding some very specific styles to the :visited property of the link that can be measured in a fairly precise manner if the link has been visited in the past.

This isn’t a bulletproof solution, however. You can only blindly test against the browser history, so need to make educated guesses and allow for changes in a URL, (such as trailing slashes or additional query string parameters). I’ve found that testing for one or two minor variations gives the best result – I might even add some minor intelligence to the function to account for this.

As before, the plug-in is of beta quality but seems to work in Safari 3, Firefox 3+, and IE 6+. I’ve bundled everything together into a GitHub repository, where you can also download version 1.0 of the plug-in in uncompressed and compressed form.