Although I disagree about what you said about the weakness of the plugin. In fact I think it is its strongness (one wouldn’t expect anything else from the author of the plugin I guess). See, I always strived for making the plugin as unobtrusive and easy to use as possible. Cluttering HTML with a most probably invalid attribute or maybe abusing the rel attribute and having to maintain two different URLs is not my definition of unobtrusiveness and ease of use. Right now you just have to plug in a few links with some clean, gracefully degrading HTML and you’re done. You don’t even have to think about wether you create in-page or remote tabs.

A decent templating engine could decide for itself wether to deliver a page with full layout or just the content part depending on the type of request. In Rails for example this is as easy as adding the following line to the controller actions where needed:

# do not render full layout if page
# is requested via XmlHttpRequest
render :layout => !request.xhr?

This can be done globally as well (DRY).

That said, I don’t think this should be in the responsibility of the plugin.

Anyways, thanks again for using the plugin and happy coding