Automatic Garbage Creation

When cookies were first introduced fifteen years ago, they were revolutionary. The web itself was in its infancy, and the ability to store browsing data for future use — well, that was just the bee’s knees. And like many web technologies of the era, cookies evolved rapidly and haphazardly, to fill a suddenly-open niche.

Flash-forward a decade.

The Internet was very different in 2004 than when cookies burst onto the scene. But it was still based on standards and pseudo-standards from a time when our expectations of web browsers were much lower.

Could a cookie store image data? A large text document? Were cookies easy to manipulate? Could they be used on more than one page in a site?

It was at this time that Opera was busy building widget support into its browser. Widgets are web apps designed to run in chromeless windows, giving the appearance of being stand-alone applications. Opera is the first and only browser to support widgets.

While designing the widget API, it ran into a brick wall when it came to storage. How could developers take full advantage of Opera if there was no way to persist data across sessions, other than a handful of four-kilobyte packets? Cookies just couldn’t cut it.

There have been some attempts in the past to reform data persistence. But faced with the daunting task of creating a viable development platform, Opera had no choice — it had to come up with a new storage API to contain an arbitrarily large amount of data.

With the release of Opera 9.0 in 2005, whole avenues of possibility opened up — the ever-present barrier of storage had folded like wet paper. The call had been sounded for a new kind of storage, a new API for a new century.

Some brave souls on the HTML5 working group took up the gauntlet, and spent the next five years hammering out an API for what is colloquially known as DOM Storage.

DOM Storage presents many advantages over the more weathered cookie. The minimal recommended storage quota is over a thousand times as much data as a cookie holds; it’s possible to persist data across an entire domain, rather than one page; and editing stored data couldn’t be easier.

Will cookies fall by the wayside?

No. DOM Storage lacks a broad install base — and server-side support.

But, like its forerunners, it will evolve.

CORRECTIONS:

• Opera 9.0 was released in 2006, not 2005.