[whatwg] Web Storage: apparent contradiction in spec

[Aaron Whyte]

As an offline cloud-app developer, I've got these three kinds of data:1)
Data from the cloud that's cached locally on a best-effort basis, that can
be thrown out if we start running out of space.
2) Data from the cloud that the app needs in order to keep functioning at
all.
3) Locally created data that may not have been synced to the cloud yet, like
emails written on an airplane.  Even if the app stops working, this data is
still valuable and recovering it is important.  Once it is synced, it can
usually be downgraded to 'best-effort'.

In order for apps to make the best use of the space they have available,
especially if space is tight, it'd be great to have an API that indicates
how big the app's quota is, and how much space it's taking up now.  Then the
app code can decide what data to keep and what data to drop, in case it
approaches the max.  Apps that sync a portion of a larger cloud-based
datastore to local disk can also use the local quota info to help decide
what to sync.

If the UA lets the user adjust the quotas, it'd be nice to expose a
quota-max-changed event, so polling won't be necessary.

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 3:59 PM, Aaron Boodman <aa at google.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 3:51 PM, Jeremy Orlow<jorlow at chromium.org> wrote:
> > I still don't understand what use local storage has outside of 'cloud
> > storage'.  Even in the extensions use case (which I think is out of scope
> > for this spec), there's no reason you can't sync user preferences and
> such
> > to the cloud.
>
> The use case, though, is local storage, not cloud storage. Requiring
> cloud storage here kind of defeats the purpose and makes the API a lot
> harder to use.
>
> - a
>
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