In my quest to create pages with large scanned documents (JPEG files), I've found a Javascript library I'd like to use for panning and zooming these large images:

https://github.com/timmywil/jquery.panzoom

Unfortunately, it requires JQuery 1.9.x or 2.x, and SilverStripe still appears to rely on 1.7.x.

I've tried blocking the Sapphire version from my page controller and replacing it with a later version of JQuery. This fixed the SCRIPT tag, but there's still some code in the Simple template that is trying to access the "$.browser" attribute, which was deprecated a long time ago and finally removed in 1.9.

Do I have any options here? Is SS planning to upgrade to a more recent version of JQuery any time soon?

We strongly recommend that you also use the jQuery Migrate plugin if you are upgrading from pre-1.9 versions of jQuery or need to use plugins that haven't yet been updated.
...
The plugin restores deprecated features and behaviors so that older code will still run properly on jQuery 1.9 and later.

http://jquery.com/download/#jquery-migrate-plugin

Perfect, thanks!

Looks like I have the start of a decent template now:

http://history.tallent.us/research/1790-us-census/1790-census-nc-anson-p3/

--Richard