tvandervossen
tvandervossen on Hacker News
I have to agree, especially since it’s pretty easy to make this kind of app work in modern desktop browsers too.
Here’s a preview for a drawing app I made this summer for the iPad and iPhone that also works fine on the desktop in Safari, Chrome, and Firefox: http://stuff.vandervossen.net/temporary/sketch.html
On the iPad it supports up to 11 touch points (don’t ask) and it has some pretty neat curve smoothing to deal with the rather low resolution of the touch events compared to a native app.
I don't think Zepto is trying to positioning itself _against_ jQuery. I think it's merely using the jQuery chaining API because it considers it an elegant design (that's actually a compliment) and to give developers something of a migration path in case their application outgrows Zepto.
First of all, my company just released a private beta for a large "desktop class" web application where our client flat-out told us to ignore Internet Explorer, to not use any Flash (audio playback is a big part of what it does), and to concentrate our efforts on creating the best possible user experience on Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. So much for "no one would hire them".
Right now it makes a lot of sense to only target WebKit browsers simply because it's the only decent rendering engine that's available on decent mobile phones. Zepto could easily support a mobile version of Firefox or IE once Firefox catches up in terms of performance and size and IE catches up in terms of support for HTML5, CSS3 and other emerging web standards.
Finally, stating that "web developers don't understand that distinction" sounds slightly derogatory, don't you think?
John, Zepto is _exactly_ intended for targeting bleeding-edge WebKit mobile browsers. Doesn't the README clearly state that?