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The past couple of years have seen numerous new web-capable mobile devices arise, including Apple's iPhone and its Safari browser, the creation of Google's Android platform and Webkit-based browser, the rise of so called "full web" browsers (Nokia's S60, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini, among others), the early development of Firefox's mobile version, and more. These mobile browsers improve users' experiences, giving them access to websites formerly off-limits to most mobile devices. Indeed, as a 2008 Nielsen Media Research report highlighted, mobile devices have increased traffic by an average of 13% across several popular websites.

We hear your words. Why another JavaScript framework?! When development of PhoneGap was under way we noticed slow load times for modern JavaScript frameworks (such as Prototype, MooTools, YUI, Ext and (yes) even jQuery. A big reason why these libraries are so big is because is mostly they contain a great deal of cross browser compatability code. The mobile space has less browser implementations (so far) and different needs. Thus XUI. XUI strives to be a framework for first class mobile device browsers such as WebKit, Fennec and Opera with future support under consideration for IE Mobile and BlackBerry.

In my last article about the benefits of SASS and CSS3, I briefly touched on a technique we use in Sencha Touch to make our interfaces resolution independent. Today I will be expanding on that technique, so you can start to make your own scalable UI elements for WebKit.

"A jQuery plugin for mobile web development on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and other forward-thinking devices."