Over the weekend, the first release of the jQuery Mobile project was announced. The idea of the jQuery Mobile project is to simplify building web applications for mobile devices, in a way that provides as great an experience as possible on various complexity of devices.
It is a well known issue that there are many mobile platforms targeting even more mobile devices. How do you provide a great experience on the high-end devices which support the latest standards and JavaScript while still making the site usable by older or less complex browsers?
This is where jQuery Mobile steps in. It is based on jQuery, and uses the principle of progressive enhancement with the goal of being functional in all HTML-capable mobile browsers. It uses HTML5 and CSS3 features in the highest end browsers and degrades well to provide interfaces for simple HTML browsers.
All jQuery Mobile features are also ARIA accessible, and can be used with keyboard navigation and screen readers on desktop PCs. It's also simple, not requiring any JavaScript configuration, and is designed to be as small as possible (it is also available distributed on the jQuery CDN). Its final trick is that it allows you to do complex theming implementations, which will come with theme builders in the future to make skinning applications extremely simple.
You can find out more about jQuery mobile on their blog, including download and CDN links.
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