Re: =[xhr]

Olli,
Thanks for the reassurance and your comment about nightly builds makes a lot of sense. Users of those would expect things to break.

All the best
Nick
--
3D Organic Animations     http://www.chemtube3d.com
Tel:             +44 (0)151-794-3506 (3500 secretary)


On 3 Sep 2014, at 13:57, Olli Pettay <olli@pettay.fi<mailto:olli@pettay.fi>> wrote:

On 09/03/2014 12:10 PM, Greeves, Nick wrote:
I would like to emphasise the detrimental effect that the proposed experimentation would have on a large number of sites across Chemistry research and
education that would mysteriously stop working when users (automatically) upgraded their browsers and JSmol ceased to function.

But you know now that sync XHR will be removed from the main thread, and have plenty of time to fix JSmol to use async XHR.
I wouldn't expect any browser to even try to remove support for sync XHR before 2016, and even then only if the usage is low enough.
(and the initial experiments to try to remove the feature would be done in nightly/development builds, not in release builds)




-Olli


JSmol is used so widely because it gets away from the historic need for a specific browser version and a specific plugin  or Java installation and
works across all browsers and platforms.

Examples of critical sites that would be broken/have to be rebuilt include

UK National Chemical Database Service http://cds.rsc.org notably CSD, ICSD, ChemSpider, CrystalWorks

I should also declare a vested interest as my own Open Educational Resource ChemTube3D depends on JSmol, which supports the teaching of Chemistry in
Liverpool and across the world. There were more than 590,000 visitors (up 48% on the previous year) from 209 countries in the last year of operation.

--
Nick Greeves                            via OS X Mail
Director of Teaching and Learning
Department of Chemistry
University of Liverpool
Donnan and Robert Robinson Laboratories
Crown Street, LIVERPOOL L69 7ZD U.K.
Email address: ngreeves@liverpool.ac.uk<mailto:ngreeves@liverpool.ac.uk> <mailto:ngreeves@liverpool.ac.uk>
WWW Pages: http://www.chemtube3d.com<http://www.chemtube3d.com/>
Tel:            +44 (0)151-794-3506 (3500 secretary)
Dept Fax:   +44 (0)151-794-3588