[jsword-devel] RSS feeds and news page

[Greg Hellings]

On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 8:28 AM, DM Smith <dmsmith at crosswire.org> wrote:
> * Allow me to drag sections to re-arrange them. I've heard that there is a way to store prefs on the user's machine w/o cookies. IIRC, Greg Hellings has played around w/ it.

There are several ways specified to be released when HTML 5 becomes a
reality (the latest news I heard was all major browsers should fully
support it by 2022 - so I'm not holding my breath for anything that
needs cross-browser support).  Fortunately, some of these have come
down to us early.

Of all the ways I know to store and access data locally, there are 4
with varying levels of support and usage.

*Cookies - known and loved everywhere, even wget and curl have support
for them.  There is a limit of 4KB for a site. Advantages include
being able to access the data on the server side as well as client,
the ability to limit cookies with more fine-grained control than just
per-domain, and the ability to set expire times and dates.

*sessionStorage - a JavaScript object supported in Firefox, Safari,
Chrome, Opera and recent versions of IE (I have successfully used it
in IE7 and IE8).  This is local to the particular tab/window that is
open, limited to the current domain.  Advantages: it is more
expressive than cookies as any data-only JavaScript structure may be
assigned to it, it does not sport the 4KB limit.  But it is not
accessible server-side and it does not persist between browser
restarts or across browser windows and tabs.

*localStorage - almost exactly like sessionStorage except for its
scope.  It usually stands from a user-configurable limit (defaults to
5MB per domain), is supposed to be the same across multiple visits to
a site, tabs or windows sharing the same object.  It will persist from
visit to visit to the site unless the users clears all local data.  I
haven't used this myself but Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and IE8
all claim to support it (I don't know about IE7)

*client side database - This allows the full power of SQLite entire on
the client-side of the fence.  It is more or less the same as
localStorage except it is SQL-based and has support in fewer browsers.
 Opera, Chrome and some of the latest Firefoxes have it, I believe.
IE8 does not and from what I read neither will IE9.  Depending on
implementation this can either share the same storage space and limit
as localStorage or it can have an independent per-domain limit.
Probably the worst option if you care to support everything and
anything.

Additionally it might be good to note that my understanding is Mobile
Safari on the iPhone and possibly the Android browser both have
support for these from my reading.  If you have further questions, I'd
be happy to help.

--Greg