[whatwg] Proposal for local-storage file management

[Jens Alfke]

There's some feature-creep going on in this thread. I think a  
filesystem API is a good feature for the future, but the immediate  
issue is with the pending local-storage API: how to balance  
applications' legitimate needs for permanent local storage with users'  
legitimate needs to manage disk usage and backups. I don't think  
that's an issue we can put off until HTML6 or whenever.

Yes, my suggestion does involve the filesystem, but not in a way  
that's visible to the web-app. The app simply sees a persistent key- 
value store as currently spec'ed; it has no idea where in the  
filesystem the user has chosen to put it. Whereas the user just  
decides on a parent folder (and maybe a quota), without having access  
to the individual records inside.

The purpose is just for the user to have some control of whether to  
give the app storage at all, and if so where to put it, and the  
ability to manage that storage via the regular file manager UI. (Or  
for platforms that don't have such a UI, like the iPhone, some kind of  
flat list of web-apps.)

—Jens