Getting started

All pages in jQuery Mobile are built with clean, semantic HTML to ensure compatibility with pretty much any web-enabled device. In devices that interpret CSS and JavaScript, jQuery Mobile applies progressive enhancement techniques to unobtrusively transform the page into a rich, interactive experience that leverages the power of jQuery and CSS3. The jQuery Mobile framework is designed to be easy enough to allow designers to build complex mobile-optimized web sites and apps with minimal JavaScript knowledge, yet powerful and extensible enough for experienced developers to build highly customized experiences.Key features include:

• Familiar jQuery syntax and patterns and a simple, markup-driven approach for minimal learning curve
• Very lightweight size (9k compressed for all mobile functionality) minimal image dependencies for speed.
• Progressive enhancement approach brings core content and functionality to all mobile, tablet and deskstop platforms and a rich, installed application-like experience on newer versions of all major mobile device platforms (iOS, Android, Blackberry, Palm WebOS, Nokia/Symbian, Windows Mobile, bada, MeeGo)
• Accessibility features such as WAI-ARIA are also included to ensure that the pages work for screen readers (e.g. VoiceOver in iOS) and other assistive technologies.
• Events are normalized in jQuery Mobile to streamline the process of supporting touch, mouse, and cursor focus-based user input methods with a simple API.
• Powerful theming framework and ThemeRoller application make highly-branded experiences feast and easy to build.

Markup-driven configuration: Mobilize()

The jQuery Mobile library uses a mobilize() function that automatically initializes plugins for all the jQuery Mobile widgets found on a page. HTML5 data-role attributes in HTML markup act as the trigger for the mobilize function. For example, a data-role="listview" attribute on an simple unordered list tells the mobilize() function to apply all the CSS classes and JavaScript behaviors required to transform a list of links into a finger-friendly mobile list view widget. Developers can choose to omit the mobilize() function and write their own tools to trigger the jQuery Mobile plugins, but it is a convenient way to unobtrusively apply the plugins in consistent way.