The jQuery Mobile team is thrilled to announce the 1.4.0 Alpha release. For this release we focused on performance improvements and reviewing widgets. We also introduced a new default theme and SVG icons. Some of the new features that come with this release are a flip switch widget, a generic filter widget named “filterable”, popups with arrows, tooltips for sliders and we integrated the tabs widget from jQuery UI.
Key changes | Download & CDN
Performance
To improve performance we reduced DOM manipulation. Generation of inner markup for elements styled as butons has been completely removed. In many cases the framework just adds classes to the native element during enhancement and we even reduced the amount of classes that are added by the framework.
Theme inheritance
One of the biggest changes is the way theme inheritance works. In previous versions we used JavaScript to find the nearest parent element with a theme and added theme classes to all elements. This has been replaced by a pure CSS solution where the level of specificity of the selector determines what theme (swatch) is applied. In almost all cases the default for option theme has been removed and widgets get the same theme as their container or page via CSS.
New default theme
This was also a good time to switch to a new default theme with a flat, more modern, design. The number of swatches has been reduced from five to two; a light “A” swatch and a dark “B” swatch. We will update the ThemeRoller soon so you can create your own themes for 1.4.
SVG icons
Not only the theme is new. A big thank you to Glyphish for creating a complete new icon set for jQuery Mobile! These are vector-based SVG icons, but we included a fallback to external PNG icons on browsers that don’t support inline SVG. We are also going to provide additional stylesheets, each with different icon CSS (inline SVG, data-uri PNG, and external PNG) that can be used with the full Grunticon solution.
Please help us test
In the next few weeks we will work on updating the API documentation and the Demo Center, and creating an upgrade guide. While we work on it, this guide will be available as wiki page on the Github repo. Please help us by testing the Alpha version, giving us your feedback, and reporting issues.
Thanks
We want to say thanks to everyone who contributed. Thank you Sven Franck for all your hard work on the new filterable widget and the table widget!
More than 1,500 commits, many issues fixed, countless improvements made. Here is jQuery Mobile 1.4 Alpha!
New features
- Theming: The active and focus styles are now themeable
- Links: Deprecated class ui-link. One style for links in body and bars (bar link colors were never themeable in ThemeRoller)
- Controlgroup: Added option theme
- Popup: New feature popup arrow
- Slider: New feature slider tooltip
- Touch events now have teardown methods
- New option for taphold event $.special.event.tap.emitTapOnTaphold default = true;
- New widget Toolbar: replaces page.sections (which is removed) and handles all header and footer bars
- Fixed Toolbars are now an extension on the toolbar widget
- Toolbars work outside of pages
- True persistant Toolbars
- Textinput: added option corners
- Slider and Rangeslider: added option corners.
- New set of vector-based icons from Glyphish with fallbacks via Grunticon
- Base tag support https://github.com/jquery/jquery-mobile/issues/3978
- New flip switch widget
- New filterable widget
- Integrated UI tabs widget
- Popup work outside of pages
- Panel work outside of pages
- Option wrapperClass to add custom classes to a generated wrapper
- All widgets (excluding listview, tables, and selectmenu) have options that can be set after the widget has been instantiated
- All widgets (excluding listview, tables, and selectmenu) have an option named “enhanced” that allows you to provide the markup the widget itself would generate, thus saving startup time
- Table now also has a rebuild method that makes it possible to dynamically add columns
Changes
- Theming: The theme swatch for pages does no longer default to “c” but “a”. Dialog overlays still default to “a”. The loader theme defaults to “a” instead of “e”. Headers and footers don’t have default “a” anymore but inherit the page theme. List dividers don’t default to “b” but inherit the list theme. Count bubbles in listviews don’t default to “c” anymore, but inherit from the LI/button/divider. Count bubbles in multiple selects always had theme “c” but now always inherit the theme from the button.
- Button style: We now use the same padding and icon positioning rules for all elements that are styled as button and changed px values to em values.
- Option mini: We don’t set specific padding values for ui-mini anymore, but only set a smaller font-size. Because we use em values now, the padding will still be adjusted. Instead of data-mini=”true” you can add class ui-mini to a container. Now it’s also very easy to use a media query to only apply the mini size at a certain screen width.
- Icons: We use :after pseudo element for icons instead of adding a span with class ui-icon. The icon class (ui-icon-[iconname]) is added to the button.
- data-add-back-btn now set on toolbar not page
- Listview filter has been replaced by new generic filter widget (“filterable”)
- Panel: Always scroll to top when opening a panel, unless it’s a fixed panel
Removal
- No generating of inner button markup (.ui-btn-inner and .ui-btn-text) anymore. For linked listviews this means the anchor is now the button and no longer get class .ui-link-inherit.
- Listviews: We no longer add the classes ui-li-has-arrow (list item) and ui-btn-icon-right (list button).
- Button: Button elements are no longer wrapped in a div. Inputs type submit and reset used to get class ui-submit on the wrapper div. This has been changed to class ui-input-btn and also applies to input type button. The native input element no longer gets class ui-btn-hidden.
- Form labels: Labels no longer get a class (they used to get the widget class).
- Listview: Removed nested listview feature (deprecated in 1.3).
- Dropped support for IE7 and BB5 (now C-grade)
Deprecation
- Deprecated auto-enhancement of links in toolbars: https://github.com/jquery/jquery-mobile/issues/5933
- Deprecated class ui-disabled. Use class ui-state-disabled instead.
- Deprecated class ui-btn-corner-all. One corner class: ui-corner-all (corner radii for buttons have selector .ui-btn.ui-corner-all).
- Listviews thumbs and icons (small image left): The feature to auto-detect thumbs and icons has been deprecated to improve performance. If a list item (read-only) or button (linked) contains a thumb you have to add class ui-li-has-thumb to the LI. If it contains an icon you have to add ui-li-has-icon to the LI and don’t have to add class ui-li-icon to the image element anymore. Also, the framework doesn’t add class ui-li-thumb anymore in 1.4.
- Theming inheritance: Deprecated getInheritedTheme(). Theme inheritance is done with CSS now.
- Deprecated data-role=”field-contain”. Just add class “ui-field-contain”.
- Icon shadow: Deprecated option iconshadow for buttons and select. You can use class ui-shadow-icon on a container or a button (same as ui-icon-alt and ui-icon-nodisc). Also work with listviews, controlgroups, checkbox/radio, etc. that didn’t have option iconshadow.
- The second pagebeforechange has been replaced with pagebeforetransition. Both will be triggered for compatibility
- Deprecated current persistent fixed toolbars in favor of true persistent (outside page)
- Deprecated current dialog widget. Dialog will become an option in the page widget.
- Deprecated current slider widget. We are going to refactor or replace the slider widget in next version.
- Deprecated input element generation for filter
- Deprecated filterPlaceholder option for filterable
- Deprecated current behaviour of stripping query strings from hashes. Starting in 1.5 we’ll be following spec on hashes and provide a hook to handle custom navigation.
Download
CDN-Hosted JavaScript:
- Uncompressed: jquery.mobile-1.4.0-alpha.1.js (useful for debugging)
- Minified and Gzipped: jquery.mobile-1.4.0-alpha.1.min.js (24KB, ready to deploy)
CDN-Hosted CSS:
- Uncompressed with Default theme: jquery.mobile-1.4.0-alpha.1.css (useful for debugging)
- Minified and Gzipped with Default theme: jquery.mobile-1.4.0-alpha.1.min.css (7KB, ready to deploy)
- Uncompressed structure without a theme: jquery.mobile-1.4.0-alpha.1.css (useful for theme development)
- Minified and Gzipped structure without a theme: jquery.mobile-1.4.0-alpha.1.min.css (6KB, ready to deploy)
Copy-and-Paste Snippet for CDN-hosted files:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.4.0-alpha.1/jquery.mobile-1.4.0-alpha.1.min.css" /> <script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.10.1.min.js"></script> <script src="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.4.0-alpha.1/jquery.mobile-1.4.0-alpha.1.min.js"></script>
Note: jQuery Mobile 1.4 also supports jQuery core 2.0.
ZIP File: If you want to host the files yourself you can download a zip of all the files:
- Zip File: jquery.mobile-1.4.0-alpha.1.zip (JavaScript, CSS, and images)
Fork jQuery Mobile on GitHub