On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 12:42 PM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 06/09/11 18:09, Magnus Manske wrote:
Support for 3D-rendered molecules on Wikipedia has been on the wishlist since ... forever. This was never done due to security concerns, IIRC.
The security issues were just normal XSS, easily fixed with an hour or two of work.
I just found this site : http://alteredqualia.com/canvasmol/#Penicillin
3D molecule rendering completely in JavaScript using canvas. Since it only runs in the user's browser, Wikipedia servers are not at risk; we'd probably have to check the code for potential XSS problems etc., and add a wrapper with a fallback to our normal PNG for non-JavaScript browsers and, yes, old IE. But so what.
I think we should go with Jmol, which has many excellent features (not just ball and stick rendering like this canvasmol), a substantial community behind it, and a large content base already hosted on MediaWiki wikis, most notably Proteopedia.
Jmol is fine with me. My point was that, since we can't seem to get the "traditional" stuff deployed, pure JavaScript might be a workable shortcut.
Magnus