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Comment by tvandervossen | Hacker News Reader

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?

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At best developing exclusively for bleeding-edge platforms is a niche-market. Is there enough interest now to hire a few developers to build HTML 5/CSS 3/etc.-only experiences? Absolutely. Is this a tenable position for anything more than a minor fraction of the web development market? No.

Companies like making money (naturally). iOS provides a clear path for them: They build an app, it goes on the app store, out to millions of people, and the money comes in. That is undisputed - you can absolutely make a nice living targeting exclusively iOS devices (by extension, WebKit-only platforms).

However this is conflating the problem space of "building mobile web applications" with "building mobile apps that use web tech". Buiding web-tech mobile apps is, functionality-wise, a sub-set of building mobile web applications. Any functionality that you would need to build a mobile web app you would also need to build a mobile app (albeit you can skim far more off the file size and functionality by targeting just apps - as Zepto has done).

jQuery is targeted at supporting "building web applications" and "building mobile web applications" - the two harder problems in the space. When you compare Zepto (designed to make it easy to build mobile apps targeted at a single platform) to jQuery (designed to make it easy to build mobile web applications targeted at many platforms) the difference is night and day.

This is the disingenuous part of this discussion: Zepto is, apparently, exclusively positioning itself against jQuery - even though they are completely dissimilar. However to the lay user that distinction is completely muddled when the API of one is directly compared to the other - when, in fact, they are nothing alike.

A better comparison would be comparing Zepto to XUI: http://xuijs.com/ XUI also targets the best-of-breed mobile platforms and makes it easy to build mobile apps.

Agree with a better comparison being XUI, but adding "jQuery" to the description gets more attention.

I have to say though John that your view of what makes a great app framework doesn't necessarily matter to everyone. I think your philosophy is executed quite well in jQuery Mobile, but that doesn't make your approach the best one for all cases.

Your choice to go for broad support actually weakens the showing of jQuery Mobile on more shiny devices compared to products which have them in mind to begin with. Does that make jQuery Mobile then inferior? Hell no! It's great, does what you set out to do, and does it well.

Thomas' pretty obvious use of the jQuery name to get some attention aside, there's nothing wrong with zepto's philosophy. It differs from yours, but it will undoubtedly have an appeal to some people or for certain projects, just probably not the same projects where someone would find jQuery Mobile appealing.

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.

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