[whatwg] Web Storage: apparent contradiction in spec

[Remco]

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 2:26 AM, Peter Kasting<pkasting at google.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 4:55 PM, Michael Nordman <michaeln at google.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> What seems inevitable are vista-like prompts to allow something (or prods
>> to delete something) seemingly unrelated to a user's interaction with a
>> site... please, oh please, lets avoid making that part of the web platform.
>
> I hate prompts as much as you.
> Flash uses a model where a site can silently store small amounts of data
> with no prompts.  Because devices have wildly different storage amounts, one
> could imagine a UA on a desktop machine allowing a site to store, say, 2 MB
> without prompting, while on a phone the site might only get 20 KB, or maybe
> none at all.  This would mean users would be prompted sooner or more often
> on a phone, which seems like a reasonable outcome to me given that a phone
> may have so little storage that serious use of Local Storage may be
> difficult to impossible anyway.
> In this world, the hard quotas I suggested become "soft quotas" which result
> in some kind of user elevation.  A UA could elect not to elevate and just
> deny the additional space if its authors felt that prompts were evil :)

This makes me think about applications that need to store huge amounts
of data in order to work. Imagine that Quake Live is ported to WebGL
and uses Local Storage so it can work without any plugin. The app will
want to store some 500MB of game data. If local storage were to work
like a cache, then everything else would likely get purged each time
you play the game.

-- 
Remco