Re: Web Storage Scope and Charter

On Thu, 23 Apr 2009, Doug Schepers wrote:
> 
> This seems to lead into a discussion of use cases and requirements.

There's only one requirement that I know of:

* Allow Web sites to store structured data on the client.

There are many use cases, e.g. Google is interested in this to enable its 
applications to be taken offline. We recently released offline GMail using 
this SQL backend; one could easily imagine other applications like 
Calendar, Reader, Docs&Spreadsheets, etc, supporting offline mode. A while 
back we released a demo of Reader using Gears' SQL database. But we would 
rather use a standard API than rely on Gears.


> So, some of the requirements you're listing here are:
> * more useful for Web authors as a whole than SQL

At least as useful, not necessarily more useful. (SQL obviously wouldn't 
itself be a fit if it had to be more useful than SQL!)


> * browser vendors are willing to implement it
> * should have broad and scalable applicability

These two seem like they apply to pretty much anything we do.


> Which other solutions have you looked at that don't meet these criteria?

Straight structured storage (e.g. a "JSON" object), the DOM, Atom-based 
storage mechanisms, Lucene (better than SQL for full text search, not so 
good for anything else), CouchDB (better for hetreogeneous data sets, not 
so good for homogeneous data, e.g. a mail folder), various others.


> > The draft got published today, so it's too late to change the 
> > high-profile version of the spec.
> 
> It's not too late at all.  This group can publish as frequently as it 
> wants, and we could have another WD up next week, with such a message in 
> it. 

Fair enough. I've added a message.


> If we are able to come to an immediate conclusion, I'm all in favor of 
> that. But Nikunj, at least, doesn't seem to think we are there yet, so I 
> think it's worth reopening the larger issue.

Given that implementations are shipping and high-profile Web pages are 
actively using these features today, we really should come to a decision 
sooner rather than later, or it'll become a moot point.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Thursday, 23 April 2009 22:35:20 UTC