[whatwg] Storage quota introspection and modification

2010/3/11 Ian Fette (????????) <ifette at google.com>:
> I think apps will have to deal with hitting quota as you describe, however
> with a normal desktop app you usually have a giant disk relative to what the
> user actually needs. When we're talking about shipping something with a 5mb
> or 50mb default quota, that's a very different story than my grandfather
> having a 1tb disk that he is never going to use. Even with 50mb (which is
> about as much freebie quota as I think I am comfortable giving at the
> moment), you will blow through that quite quickly if you want to sync your
> email.

How did you come up with 50MB?  As a user, I would want "the
application that is gmail" to have the same capabilities as "the
application that is thunderbird", I think.  Isn't that our goal?

> The thing that makes this worse is that you will blow through it at
> some random point (as there is no natural "installation" point from the APIs
> we have.

That's the case for desktop applications too, really -- mostly I run
out of disk not when I install uTorrent or Thunderbird, but when I'm
trying the Nth linux distro to find one that likes my video card or
someone mails me an HD-resolution powerpoint and I'm about to head to
the airport.

> I would personally be in
> favor of this approach, if only we had a good way to define what it meant to
> "offline the app".

Sorry, I was working from that premise, which (I thought!) you stated
in your first message:

"I personally would not expect to browse to a site and then just
happen to be able to use it offline, nor do I expect users to have
that expectation or experience. Rather, I expect going through some
sort of flow like clicking something that says "Yes, I want to use
Application X offline"."

Could also be an infobar on first some-kind-of-storage use, which
users can click to say "yeah, make sure this works offline" vs "it can
use some storage, I guess, but don't let it get in the way of my
torrents!"  I am not a UI designer worth the term, but I *do* believe
that the problem is solvable.

Mike

Received on Thursday, 11 March 2010 12:00:33 UTC