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About Fluid Mobile Skinning System (mFSS)

mFSS provides a pure CSS mobile skinning framework for webkit-based browsers (including those bundled by the iPhone and Android).

About jQuery Mobile (jQM)

jQuery Mobile is the current evolution of the jQTouch project and is currently (as of Feb 2011) in alpha release status. The project offers a mobile skinning framework that supports a large number of browsers, as well as additional mobile-specific features like touch events and AJAX page transitions. jQM's documentation doubles as a demonstration of the framework and can be found at http://jquerymobile.com/test/.

Comparing jQM and mFSS

jQuery Mobile is genrally a much more heavy-weight, JavaScript-intensive framework that mFSS. While mFSS performs skinning based solely on a set of well-defined CSS classes, jQM requires developers to place custom attributes on elements, which are later parsed and "enhanced" by the JavaScript library.

This enhancement strategy means that original markup is small, easily readable, and easy to write, but also means that the framework is heavily dependent on javascript and that the final markup differs significantly from the original written markup. This strategy may cause problems for low-bandwidth mobile users, as well as creates some problems with using the Fluid renderer.

Fluid has stated an intention to work with and complement jQM rather that competing with it. ~bourey is currently hopeful that uPortal can adopt the best parts of jQM, benefit in the immediate term from easy skinning resources, but continue to work with Fluid for a more balanced long-term solution.

Reasons to Use jQuery Mobile

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