[whatwg] Storage quota introspection and modification

[Mike Shaver]

2010/3/11 Ian Fette (イアンフェッティ) <ifette at google.com>:
> AFAIK most browsers are setting a default quota for storage options that is
> on the order of megabytes.

Could well be, indeed.  It sounded like you'd done some thinking about
the size, and I was curious about how you came up with that number
(versus some %age of available disk, for example).

> Yes, but I think there may be uses of things like storage for non-offline
> uses (pre-fetching email attachments, saving an email that is in a draft
> state etc.)  If it's relatively harmless, like 1mb usage, I don't want to
> pop up an infobar, I just want to allow it. So, I don't really want to have
> an infobar each time a site uses one of these features for the first time,
> I'd like to allow innocuous use if possible

I think of an infobar as relatively innocuous, and a good balance of
user awareness versus flow interruption, but I repeat my lack of
interaction design credentials!

(Your attachment example is an interesting one, I think: do I get the
request if I request too-big an attachment, but not if it's a small
one?  Or if it's saving a blog post draft that has a bunch of images
in it, vs. one that's 140 chars long.)

> But at the same time, I want
> apps to be able to say up front, at a time when the user is thinking about
> it (because they just clicked something on the site, presumably) "here's
> what I am going to need".

OK, I see.  What if we had the named-subquota stuff, and the way you
triggered that request was creation of a named subquota?  That would
also encourage app developers to provide a description of the quota,
and perhaps the sort of "necessary for offline operation" vs "improves
performance" vs "supports additional features".  The named subquota
creation request could give an initial requested size and estimated
upper bound for the size.  An async event delivered back (or a
callback called) could tell the app what quota it was granted, if any
(or maybe just that it was granted some, but the size limit wasn't
specified).

Mike