Another solution for lists that should flow in column order (as in phonebooks)
I asked the question mainly because I had to display a list of about 1000 users. This kind of list is very long and involves a lot of scrolling. So I needed a solution to put these users in columns so they also flow from top to bottom column by column from left to right. CSS3 multi-column layout provides exactly what I need, but browser support is the problem. They're still not supported on IE9 and my users mainly use IE (8 or 9). Hence I needed a solution to work using CSS2.1
That's the reason I've written a jQuery plugin that takes a set of elements that are either set to float: left/right; or display: inline-block; and transposes them so they're ordered in the order of column layout.
Plugin reorders elements and doesn't add any column wrappers or anything. It just rearranges elements so they seem to be flowing in columns instead of rows.
You can check my blog post where the problem is detailed and you can also see a working example that rearranges/transposes US States. Or you can also watch the project on GitHub and get updates when a new version is out (or report issues you may have with it).
