Chapter 3. jQuery Mobile

jQuery Mobile[18] is an open source JavaScript UI framework built upon the popular jQuery library, created by John Resig during the last decade.

The development of jQuery Mobile started mid-2010, and quickly became one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks ever. Today jQuery Mobile is used in more mobile web applications than any other framework.

jQuery Mobile is an open source project, hosted on Github and with a very complete website, full of documentation, samples, and references to applications created with the framework.

Note

At the time of this writing, the current stable version of jQuery Mobile is version 1.1.0. On the other hand, the latest available version of jQuery is 1.7.2.

Supported Platforms

jQuery Mobile works on the vast majority of all modern desktop, smartphone, tablet, and ereader platforms. In addition, feature phones and older browsers are also supported because of a progressive enhancement approach. This is probably one of the most important characteristics of jQuery Mobile.

To provide a quick summary of the browser support in jQuery Mobile, the team has created a simple A (full), B (full minus Ajax), C (basic) grade system with notes of the actual devices and versions where the library has been tested on. The visual fidelity of the experience is highly dependent on CSS rendering capabilities of the device and platform, so not all A grade experience will be pixel-perfect.

Compatibility

Users of the most advanced mobile browsers can enjoy ...

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