<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br><div><div>On Aug 25, 2009, at 3:09 PM, Jens Alfke wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Interesting comments. Linus and Jeremy appear to be coming at this from a pure "cloud" perspective, where any important or persistent data is kept on a remote server and the browser, so local storage can be treated as merely a cache. That's definitely a valid position, but from my perspective, much of the impetus for having local storage is to be able to support <i>other</i> application models, where important data is stored locally. If browsers are free to dispose HTML5 local storage without the user's informed consent, such applications become dangerously unreliable.<div><br></div><div>For example, Linus wrote:</div><div><blockquote type="cite">User agents need to be free to garbage collect any local state. If they can't then attackers (or the merely lazy) will be able to fill up the user's disk. We can't expect web sites or users to do the chore of taking out the garbage.</blockquote><br></div><div>Replace "user agent" -> "operating system" and "local state" -> "user files", and you have an argument that, when the hard disk in my MacBook gets too full, the OS should be free to start randomly deleting my local files to make room. This would be a really bad idea.</div><div><br></div><div>Similar analogies — </div><div>• If the SD card in my Wii fills up, should the system automatically start deleting saved games?</div><div>• If my iPhone's Flash disk gets full, should it start deleting photos? What if I haven't synced those photos to my iTunes yet?</div><div><br></div><div>In each of those cases, what the device actually does is warns you about the lack of free space, and lets you choose what to get rid of.</div><div><br></div><div>Local storage is different from cloud storage. The HTML5 storage API can be used for both, so it shouldn't be limited to what's convenient for just one of them.</div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#144FAE"><br></font></font></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div>Thank you Jens. This is a well thought out synopsis of the point I've been wanting to make whenever this comes up, but have failed to do.</div><div><br></div><div>~Brady</div><div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div>—Jens</div></div></blockquote></div><br></body></html>