[whatwg] Web Storage, Editor's Draft 20 August 2010 - Request for enhancement

[Jim Williams]

  I appreciate the comments on localStorage; they help me to better 
understand its uses and inherent limitations.

On 9/17/2010 3:09 PM, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 7:52 AM, Jim Williams<jgwilliams at mindspring.com>  wrote:
>> 1.  I would like the browser vendors to all use the same implementation of
>> localStorage, as this will greatly facilitate browser-independent viewing
>> experiences.  As it stands, I have no idea how to maintain continuity if a
>> user viewing my page in one browser switches to another browser. None.
> This works exactly the same as if they used two different computers.
> localStorage is "local": it's only usable on the exact same browser on
> the same machine with the same profile.  It's mostly suitable for
> caching things -- you have to always be able to handle the case that
> the user is using a different browser or a different computer, they
> reinstalled their OS for some reason, etc.  Standardizing the on-disk
> format for localStorage plus some form of synchronization would
> require enormous effort and wouldn't help your problem much, since
> typical users surely switch computers more often than they switch
> browsers on the same computer.
>