How is focusing on the future doing a disservice to anyone? We're at the very beginning of the mobile-optimized web, and the future is still unclear. There's still room to define it. Supporting the equivalent of IE6 on mobile devices seems like a waste of time to me, especially after we've just spent a decade watching the evolution of the desktop web be stunted by obsessive focus on backwards/cross compatibility.

Also, nearly all major device manufacturers have committed to using WebKit. In five years, how many mobile devices will not run WebKit? If Windows Phone 7 isn't dead by then, it might be the only one.

Even still, jQtouch (at least, I haven't messed with the Sencha thing) is very iDevice slanted. There's "webkit" and then there's "webkit on iOS", and most tools are targeted specifically at "webkit on iOS".

Well, you're clearly not serving the present.

Naturally, I expect to see into, tap, ergo and when in the jQuery core as well...

http://github.com/raganwald/jQuery-Combinators

;-)

Look at the place we are in desktop web development because we have to support old browser. We are stuck 7+ years in the past.

I understand the intellectual allure of writing a framework that supports a gazillion different devices and I appreciate what you've done with jQuery for web development but frankly, I don't care about jQueryMobile.

Except that it scares the hell out of me the day some client starts asking me to support 5 year old Nokias.

If a mobile framework can reach this goal it will make mobile development a heck of a lot easier, and I applaud that.

[1] You need some scale before development for platforms that maybe constitute 3% of your users will be a financially good option.

Not supporting it is like telling one in fourteen of your customers you don't want their business. This seems like a bad idea, unless of course you have non-financial motives, such as wanting to kill off IE6 by not supporting it and driving it into oblivion.