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Comment by swanson | Hacker News Reader

Does Trigger handle the UI elements? Or is there another project to fill the gap? I don't want the bloat of jQuery Mobile.

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I've been musing the same thing for a little while now. I think Zepto, Backbone, RequireJS and HTML5 Mobile Boilerplate makes a solid foundation for a mobile app framework, much more lightweight than jQuery Mobile, which is IMO unusable for anything but the simplest of apps. All that is missing is a CSS library to take care of the UI elements and perhaps transitions too.

One idea I had was to take the CSS from Sencha /KendoUI / jQTouch and combine with the components above to create a 'Backbone Mobile' framework. I just haven't had the time yet to figure out if this would work.

Actually the $ refers to Zepto, which is a lightweight jQuery replacement designed for mobile browsers.

I'm aware of that - but Zepto and Backbone don't have a UI layer

I'm not really sure what you mean by that - Zepto is a DOM editor and Backbone provides an MVC structure which represents the logical state of the UI. Higher-level organization in a Backbone app is accomplished by view composition.

If, however, you are referring to the weak link between Zepto-managed DOM and Backbone Views via hand-rolled render functions, then check out outback.js, a declarative data binding layer for Backbone in the same spirit as Knockout.js - well, more than spirit, the binding extensibility layer uses roughly the same API and much of the same documentation.

https://github.com/politician/outback

No, I'm pretty sure he's referring to the "theme" component of jQuery Mobile (http://jquerymobile.com/themeroller/) which isn't "taken care of" with this combo. That said, since it's just markup and CSS it shouldn't be too difficult to roll in.

Sorry - I wasn't being clear. I am looking for some kind of CSS framework that will do Android/iOS styles for buttons, tabs, transitions, etc. You get this kind of stuff with jQuery Mobile - but I didn't see how it was done with the Backbone/Zepto stack (aside from the kind of hacky animations in the demo).

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