[whatwg] Web Storage: apparent contradiction in spec

[Peter Kasting]

On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 11:24 AM, Jeremy Orlow <jorlow at chromium.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 11:18 AM, Peter Kasting <pkasting at google.com>
>  wrote:
>
>> The spec says basically what you want except that it uses "should".  It
>> seems like UAs and authors would both be satisfied with this; I don't expect
>> any UA vendor to wantonly discard local storage data.
>>
>
> If some platforms don't treat local storage as sacred, it's unlikely web
> developers are going to program one version for flash/whatever and one
> version for local storage on browsers that meet their requirements.
>  Especially since the only way you could treat these differently is by user
> agent detection which has historically been a bad thing for the web.
>

This sounds like you are either completely ignoring, or disagreeing with, my
claim that UAs aren't going to be flippant about this data.

On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 11:25 AM, Jens Alfke <snej at google.com> wrote:

> Since user data loss is one of the very worst things any program can do to
> a user, I'd like the spec to encourage UAs to take a bit more care with
> local storage.
>

Again, the spec now says in 4.3: "User agents should expire data from the
local storage areas only for security reasons or when requested to do so by
the user."  The only stronger statement you could get would be by changing
this to a "must".  It's not clear to me that that is going to result in any
practical difference on the part of implementations or author perception.

PK
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