[whatwg] Asynchronous database API feedback

[Dan Mosedale]

On Dec 10, 2007, at 12:21 PM, Geoffrey Garen wrote:

>>> I'd hate for GMail to mysteriously stop working every couple of  
>>> days just because of some background process that I had no  
>>> knowledge of. As a developer, how would you debug such a problem?  
>>> As a tech support worker, how would you explain it to an end user?

+1.  Having a bug in a single web-app be able to completely freeze the  
entire UI of the entire browser (not just that window/tab) seems like  
a pretty painful user experience, almost to the point of being  
unacceptable.  If an end user ran into this problem very often, I  
would expect them to blame the browser, and perhaps even switch to a  
browser which didn't have this problem (i.e. didn't support  
localStorage).

As a user, assuming a synchronous interface with timeouts, I would  
almost certainly want my browser to enforce a _much_ shorter timeout  
than 5 seconds... something on the order of 200ms, maybe.  Anything  
that makes repainting stop just feels really bad.

>> If we cannot provide this, I feel that localstorage will not be  
>> successful, so it won't matter what API it uses.
>
> I think this is a pretty extreme conclusion.

I tend to agree.  Aaron, can you describe the thinking behind this  
conclusion in more detail?

Dan