Why does jQuery Mobile need a web server?

Hey Josh, I'm a little rusty with my JQuery Mobile skills, but if my memory serves me correctly, JQ Mobile relies heavily on using AJAX. When you set up a webapp using the JQ Mobile framework, flipping between different views / pages is handled by asynchronously loading in content and then applying transitions. It's what gives things the feel of a native app where pages slide or fade in smoothly and there is no hard reload where the browser switches to a different html file (like on a traditional website). In order for the framework to make AJAX calls, things need to be working in a web-server environment. I believe the same is true when using the regular JQuery library for making AJAX calls or if you were manually programming AJAX functionality in Javascript. No real back-end language is required, but the web server is a dependency for AJAX.

If you don't have access to an online web-server, a localhost like WAMP or XAMPP will do the trick for working locally.