I'm using jQuery mobile to build dynamic mobile web applications. I ran into a pretty basic problem involving alerting to the user when he is doing something wrong or right.

When a mobile user fills a form and submits it, the submission is handled via AJAX, if the response contains an error, the user has to be notified somehow.

Say he added a malformed email address or there is a missing mandatory field. You can notify him inline, with a message next to or above the field, or through a popup.

What are the alert choices on mobile?

• alert() - in a web application this will show the URL of the app, not really professional.
• navigator.notification.alert() when your web application is inside PhoneGAP
• jQM Simpledialog2 - http://dev.jtsage.com/jQM-SimpleDialog/demos2/ - I am using this on some of the web applications.
• popup() function that is available from jQuery Mobile 1.2

In one of my last web applications made with jQuery mobile, I used the .popup() method, but it seems to me that it lacks from dynamic usage. I don't want to manually create the popup's content in the HTML code, I want to use the popup function as it my popup is anonymous, I don't care where it's located in the HTML source, I just want my message to be displayed on whatever page I am or whatever form I submit, etc.

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References

• What is a standard way to display errors in jQuery Mobile
• jQuery 1.2 mobile popup()