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

[Jim Williams]

The application I'm mainly thinking of is courseware, and it indeed does need to obtain server-side copies of students' work.  But, academia being what it is, these systems tend to get overused and bog down and crash, inflicting furor and anguish on students and professors alike.  An ability for the courseware to run partly offline on student computers improves reliability.  But I want students concentrating on their math, not offline/online storage sharing strategies. Security is another consideration.  Building experimental user-server exchange mechanisms isn't tolerated in my work environment, as you might imagine.  So if I can use localStorage to simulate server-side storage and build a proof-of-concept prototype that's entirely on the user's computer [i.e., mine], I have more opportunity to demo what I'm doing.  Following these ideas a little further, there's good reason to retain the user-side mechanisms in a production version, and just have the server check and sign user successes.  As the server-side checks succeed, the user can migrate his results to other students or a professor, possibly via e-mail.  That's why I'd like to have localStorage implemented in an e-mail compatible fashion.  Hopefully, the localStorage implementation would also be compatible with dropboxes. But you're right about maintaining state across multiple computers.  It would be nice to have a background mechanism for migrating student work from one student computer to another. Eric Uhrhane wrote: On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 4:52 AM, Jim Williams <jgwilli...@mindspring.com> wrote: I tried out local storage, used it to save the contents of a content-editable passage.  It worked great in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and MSIE.  Only one problem:  Every time I switched browsers, I had to start over with the original unedited passage.  So I have two requests. 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. If you need persistent cross-browser state, on a page that you control, why not just store it server-side? Then it also works from multiple computers, which even your proposed modifications to localStorage won't get you. 2.  Kindly extend the specification so that other applications can make constructive use of localStorage.  Specifically, (a) establish a convention for associating keys with particular files (e.g., by prepending the file's path name to the key), and (b) allowing other applications to treat the file and its associated local storage as a single entity.  Doing this would allow a user to e-mail the current state of a file to a friend, so that both will have the same view of the file.  This ability to share "current" views of a file is useful for maintaining HTML's role as a communications vehicle. Jim Williams