There doesn't seem to be any native way to do this. For now, I am hacking in my behavior via the following:
1. give the listview li item that i want to override a data-role of nolinks and a class of nolinks
2. Edit the jqm .js listview code (around line 4172).
var a = item.find( "a" );
var itemrolej = item.data( "role" );
//above checks for data-role. then, if it finds the nolinks one, it does not do the full conversion in the listview plugin.
if ( a.length && itemrolej != "nolinks") {
3. Override the clickable. Now all the links display normally, but the first item is the click event for the who li. So, in my pagebeforecreate custom js
$('li.nolinks').click(function() {
//alert('test 12');
return false;
});
$('li.nolinks').click(function() {
window.open(this.href);
return false;
});