[whatwg] How long should sessionStorage data persist?

[Ian Hickson]

On Sat, 4 Apr 2009, João Eiras wrote:
>
> On , Jeremy Orlow <jorlow at google.com> wrote:
> 
> > I think this also applies: "NOTE: The lifetime of a browsing context 
> > can be unrelated to the lifetime of the actual user agent process 
> > itself, as the user agent may support resuming sessions after a 
> > restart."
> 
> Should that restore sessionStorage data ? Aren't you making 
> sessionStorage much more complicated while the same use cases are 
> covered by localStorage ? sessionStorage could be optimized to be just a 
> volatile amount of data in memory, but these requirements require 
> sessionStorage to implement the same disk IO heuristics, and a complex 
> heuristic to decide when to erase sessionStorage completly.
> 
> I vote for the data to be present just while a page is open or is 
> restored from history or by going back.

User agents aren't required to do the above; but they are allowed to if 
they so desire. So the complexity is entirely optional (and I don't expect 
most UAs to avail themselves of this option).

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'