jQuery Pulse Animation Plugin
The purpose of this plugin was to make it trivial to add subtle visual cues to any web page. JQuery offers plenty in the way of simple effects but this was written to automate successive, identical transitions and the return to the original state.
This is a very light amount of code and unless something drastic changes to the core of jQuery.animate then it should be future proof for quite some time. It should be as cross browser compatible as jquery is and the examples on this page have been tested on multiple browsers, OSes, and devices.