On Jul 20, 2009, at 16:08 , Marcos Caceres wrote:
In the widgets API spec, what are the advantages of having a widgets.preferences attribute when the window.localStorage is already available on the window object?I think we should: 1. Drop widget.preferences, but require a UA to implement [WebStorage] (which we already do!). 2. Pre-populate the window.localStorage with the value of <preference> elements in the config document (no events are fired during pre-population!). 3. "Protect" read-only preferences, meaning: A. At runtime, throw a NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR exception upon any attempt to invoke the setItem() or removeItem() methods. B. upon the attempted invocation of the clear() method, a user agent must not remove the key-values of the protected preference from a storage area. WDYT?
I think it's dodgy. Basically this would mean reusing a well-known attribute but giving it different behaviour, which in general is a bad idea. The "vanilla" localStorage would never throw in such ways, and would clear() the protected preferences. This change means that localStorage won't work the same way for a given document if that document is in a widget or not. I don't think that's a good idea.
The cost of having preferences there is very low, and it makes sense semantically. Why remove it?
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