This was only ever used to grab the basepath - it's being passed in directly with Drupal.settings.basepath now.  The disadvantage to this approach is that we can no longer see the cwrcwriter iframe outside of the enclosing Drupal page.  Maybe we should leave the function in place and use it as a fallback if Drupal.settings.basepath is not defined. We've had users who would like to display their Critical Editions on their own pages.