Recently I've noticed a couple of strange behaviours with the jQuery Mobile listview widget which I cannot put my finger on, so I'm hoping some of you know.

1. Is it possible to have a non-linked listview widget a data-icon? (i.e. each li item without an <a> tag in it)? The reason I ask will become apparent in the second point.
   
   
   
2. I've had to redefine some of my lists due to performance issues. Before, I had a linked listview widget (i.e. each item contained an anchor/<a> element inside it), with an icon in each <li> item; which contained about 350 elements. This was combined using the iScroll library to give me a very fluid, native list scroll. This worked well with a few list items, however on the larger lists it was incredibly slow to scroll. I found it was due to the <li> items containing an <a> item - without them the list was very quick to scroll.
   
   Therefore I wondered what does jQuery do differently in terms of rendering for <li><a></a></li> items compared to <li></li> items?