The point has to do with how the web browser renders a page on the phone. It is rendered virtually and then only the part that needs to be on the screen is sent

The point has to do with how the web browser renders a page on the phone. It is rendered virtually and then only the part that needs to be on the screen is sent to the graphics pipeline. The rest is thrown away until you scroll and them the new view is rendered. If you go to a long web page you can see this. Scroll really quickly and you will see squares. As a result, fixed footers were and are a mess. The engine isn't smart enough to know some thing isn't a fixed element because all it is getting is pixels. As a result you would get bouncy fixed elements. Jqmobile tried to fix this by making the footer fade on touch and the reappear on scroll. The effect pissed my customers off. And me. They have 'fixed' it in 1.1 but I'm having trouble getting things to render correctly. I haven't poured a ton of time into it, but the fix wasn't plug and play. This is a nice solution and one I want to check out. I wonder if it plays nicely with Phonegap.