<p>The select menus are driven off native <code>select</code> elements, but the native selects are hidden from view and replaced with more style-friendly markup. The replacement buttons and menus are ARIA-enabled and are keyboard accessible on the desktop as well. </p>
<p>When clicked, if the menu has room it will appear as an overlay listbox, but if there are too many options to fit in the window without scrolling, the page content is wrapped in a div and hidden, and the menu is appended as a whole new page. This lets us take advantage of native scrolling while the menu is in use. </p>
<p>To add a select widget to your page, start with a standard <code>select</code> element populated with a set of <code>option</code> elements. Set the <code>for</code> attribute of the <code>label</code> to match the ID of the <code>select</code> so they are semantically associated. Wrap them in a <code>div</code> with the <code>data-role="fieldcontain"</code> attribute to help visually group it in a longer form. </p>
<p>The framework will find all <code>select</code> elements and automatically enhance them into the custom select menus.</p>
<p>If there is a select menu with too many options to show on the device's screen, the framework will automatically create a new "page" populated with a standard list view that contains all the options. This allows us to use the native scrolling included on the device for moving through a long list. The text inside the <code>label</code> is used as the title for this page.</p>
<p>It's common for developers to include a "null" option in their select element to force a user to choose an option. jQuery Mobile detects these null options and hides them in the overlay menu, showing only valid choices to the user. Examples of null options are either:</p>
<ul>
<li>An option with no value attribute (or an empty value attribute)</li>
<li>An option with no text node</li>
<li>An option with a <code>data-placeholder="true"</code> attribute. (This allows you to use an option that has a value and a textnode as a placeholder option).</li>
</ul>
<p>You can disable this feature through the selectmenu plugin's <code>hidePlaceholderMenuItems</code> option, like this:</p>
<p>jQuery Mobile will automatically disable and style option tags with the <code>disabled="disabled"</code> attribute. In the demo below, the second option "Rush: 3 days" has been set to disabled.</p>