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.
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 This has been
replaced by a pure CSS solution where the level of specificity of the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.
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