[Chicken-users] JQuery in Chickadee

[Matt Gushee]

Last night I got a shock when I tried to use Chickadee (as I often do these days). The "Contents" section was at the bottom of the page, expanded, instead of collapsed at the top; the "TOC" section wouldn't expand, and incremental search wasn't working. It was rather mystifing, since I knew I hadn't installed or uninstalled any eggs for at least a couple of weeks, nor altered my Chicken configuration in any way.

Eventually I got around to examine the Chickadee config file, where i discovered that Chickadee uses JQuery, accessed by default over the internet. Then I remembered that I had cleared my browser cache a day or two before ... and since I was working offline, that must be the problem. And indeed, I happened to have a copy of the JQuery library on my system, so I copied it into the Chickadee tree and edited the configuration to point to the local copy. Problem solved!

But I wonder if it wouldn't make more sense to simply bundle JQuery with Chickadee in the first place--after all, I would think that offline usage is one of the major reasons for having Chickadee in the first place, and people do need to clear their caches now and then for a variety of reasons. I can't see any non-trivial disadvantages to bundling the library, unless there is a licensing conflict.

What says the community?