Question

I’m making a fairly simple mobile version for our website. It’s not going to have every website option and the buttons I will be designing myself. For their functionality though, being pop up and sliding and stuff I was considering using jquery, then I noticed jquery Mobile. I don’t think I’m going to need all the theming options that jquery mobile has.

Would it be better then to use jquery or jquery mobile for my mobile project?

Answer 1

jQuery Mobile actually includes all of jQuery. It is not smaller but rather adds in

• Themeing
• Mobile widgets (like buttons, dialogs, lists)
• Markup initializers (so that your widgets can be initialized by adding an attribute to the html)
• An event system for detecting touchscreen events (like swipe)
• A hash-navigation system so that the back button works with it’s ajax navigation
• Some other fairly minor stuff (mostly facades to fix browser compatibility issues)

If you do not need any of those things then there is no point including jQuery Mobile. If you want only hash-navigation then you can more easily just get a jQuery plugin targeted at that only. I would not use jQuery Mobile unless you use its theming/widgets and navigation system as it can be a bit of a pain if you stray off the tracks.