Mind you, I love how these controls look, however…
HTML 5 + jQuery UI (or Mobile) JQM + Chrome = fail.
Too many controls just don’t work correctly with Chrome, and I don’t have the time to look up all of these fixes.
Popup calendars stop working for date type fields. Expando areas won’t collapse, range controls get hijacked for a slider, etc.
JQM render/refresh/create fail
Sometimes I can call refresh, sometimes I have to create, sometimes I have to call the widget directly.
My application is AJAX rich, and it is painfully inconsistent which way I need to go to fix the section of HTML.
Less code = More code
Pretty much you want to use these controls to reduce your coding, for getting better looking forms. However, I have had to put substantially more code in my views than I ever wanted to. This whole process has muddied my architecture way too much, and increased the download.
Is this the end of JQUI and JQM for me?
No way! It is just that there is a place and time for these frameworks, and what I am currently working on is neither.
The future..
When I don’t have multiple deadlines sitting on my shoulders, then I will take the time to create a support plugin to overcome these issues. So in plane English, I’ll never get to it.
[Edit] An update to this article
I still won’t use JQM, but I have started using JQUI again, due to it being part of Bootstrap Twitter. Also since Angular.JS loves working with both libs I am finding my new love in JQUI, just not in JQM. The good news is that JQUI + Bootstrap Twitter makes JQM nearly obsolete. Yay!