There are a couple of questions about Backbone towards the bottom of the article, and this seems like a fine place to answer them: akshayr mentions that in the

There are a couple of questions about Backbone towards the bottom of the article, and this seems like a fine place to answer them: akshayr mentions that in the context of an event handler in a View, "this" is bound to the instance of the view -- which differs from jQuery, where "this" is bound to the element that the event originated from. This is by design: it's awfully nice if methods on a View maintain their notion of "this", regardless of if they're called directly, or triggered by a DOM event. If you want to know which element was clicked, that's what "event.target" is good for, where "event" is the object that jQuery passes as the first argument to all DOM events. Here's an example that makes use of both "this", and the specific element: var NoteList = Backbone.View.extend({ events: { "click .note .title": "openNote" }, openNote: function(e) { var el = $(e.target); var note = this.notes.get(el.attr('data-id')); note.open(); } ... }); The other issue raised is the lack of JSONP support in the default implementation of Backbone.sync. It would be great to make this a configurable option, without having to drop down into jQuery for simple fetches, as akshayr did. Hopefully this will be a part of the next release.