- From: Peter Kasting <pkasting@google.com>
- Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2009 17:26:11 -0700
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 4:55 PM, Michael Nordman <michaeln at google.com>wrote: > What seems inevitable are vista-like prompts to allow something (or prods > to delete something) seemingly unrelated to a user's interaction with a > site... please, oh please, lets avoid making that part of the web platform. > I hate prompts as much as you. Flash uses a model where a site can silently store small amounts of data with no prompts. Because devices have wildly different storage amounts, one could imagine a UA on a desktop machine allowing a site to store, say, 2 MB without prompting, while on a phone the site might only get 20 KB, or maybe none at all. This would mean users would be prompted sooner or more often on a phone, which seems like a reasonable outcome to me given that a phone may have so little storage that serious use of Local Storage may be difficult to impossible anyway. In this world, the hard quotas I suggested become "soft quotas" which result in some kind of user elevation. A UA could elect not to elevate and just deny the additional space if its authors felt that prompts were evil :) I'm assuming that UA will have out-of-band mechanisms to 'bless' certain > sites which should not be subject to automated eviction. If push comes to > shove, the system could suggest cleaning up one of these 'blessed' sites if > inactivity for an extended period was noticed. But for the overwhelming > number of sites in a users browsing history, its a different matter. > > If the storage APIs are just available for use, no questions asked.... > making the storage just go away, no questions asked, is symmetrical. > > Blessing involves asking questions... making it go away does too. > If we suggest that the user be prompted before anything be written "persistently", there are a couple bad outcomes (note that these are problems with Gears today): * The user is asked to make a choice _before_ using the app's functionality, at which point he is ill-prepared to decide how much he likes the app or what it should be able to do * The app author is less-likely to bother to use Local Storage since prompts drive users away, and just uses Flash I think the overall UX from requiring "blessing" on all persistent data (as opposed to on "large" data sets) is poorer. PK -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/attachments/20090826/93932c61/attachment.htm>
Received on Wednesday, 26 August 2009 17:26:11 UTC