site needs Polymer 3.x upgrade

[Craig Berry]

Currently Chrome throws a lot of warnings that look like:

HTML Imports is deprecated and will be removed in M73, around March 2019. Please use ES modules instead. See https://www.chromestatus.com/features/5144752345317376 for more details.

This is because the annotation client and parts of annopub itself are based on Polymer 1.x, which uses HTML imports. Current Polymer is 3.x, but neither 2.x nor 3.x is backwards compatible. There is a project called Polymer modulizer:

https://github.com/Polymer/tools/tree/master/packages/modulizer

that will automate some aspects of a conversion. But it's only designed to support 2.x-3.x, and there are no automated methods for getting from 1.x to 2.x.

So there is a sizable upgrade project that will become an emergency in the next few months.

[Craig Berry]

This appears not to be as much of an emergency as I thought since Chrome should just use polyfills the same way other browsers have always done. See: https://www.polymer-project.org/blog/2018-10-02-webcomponents-v0-deprecations.

If we do want to get to Polymer 3, it will be a hard slog since the automated conversion tools for 2 --> 3 do not do much for you if you are on 1.x as we are.

[Craig Berry]

The annotation client has now been upgraded to Polymer 3 and integrated here, and the same has been done to the login and registration pages in the main app.

[Craig Berry]

The annotation client has now been upgraded to Polymer 3 and integrated here, and the same has been done to the login and registration pages in the main app.