How to store website data with HTML5

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Throughout your web browsing careers I’m sure you’ve come across the notion of cookies, pieces of text stored by the browser to be retrieved and used at a later date. These vary from simply remembering your name to welcome you personally next time you visit, to more complicated storage of authentication and shopping-cart contents.

Cookies generally work well but can be fiddly to implement, as they are set to be deleted by default once the browser is closed. If a website owner needs the data to be stored for a longer period, a cookie can be given an expiry date. Again this isn’t as clean as it could be: how far into the future do you set the date, for example? And what happens when a user flushes out their cookies?

HTML5 attempts to clean this up with the introduction of web storage.

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