The primary way to save information to a user’s browser was ‘cookies’, which includes preference settings, login info, generic form data. But HTML5 offers the client-side storage APIs, and for that you need to write a bit of JavaScript which is actually not a tough task.

Over the years, Web-based application complexity has grown to a large extent. Accordingly, most of the web applications depend on the retrieval and transmission of large amounts of data between client and server. And with the arrival of HTML5, one can build efficient web applications, as there are many techniques and tools available; and one of those is HTML5 local storage tool.

Local Storage stores client-side data and its main aim is to replace cookies. Well, compared to cookies, the local storage can easily store and retrieve large amounts of data; and that too without large request overhead. The limitation with ‘cookies’ is – they have a small size as well as all cookie data are passed in the HTTP headers on every page request, which adds an adequate amount of overhead to requests.

Local Storage and its Advantages

Local Storage is the space where your data is stored locally on the client-side machine and it will be preserved even if the user closes their browser. This preserved data can be used and loaded again when the user try to access the application at some later time.

Below are some of the advantages of HTML 5 storage over cookie-based storage:

  • Every data is stored totally on the client.
  • The data does not shuttle between the client and server on each request or response. The size of the storage space is large compared to that of a cookie.
  • Session-based storage is available.

Browser Support

Web storage supported browsers are – Firefox, Internet Explorer 8+, Opera, Safari and Chrome. And the browser which does not support Web Storage is Internet Explorer 7 and earlier versions.

Store data on the client side – It is one of the most amazing features of HTML5, which is storing information in user’s browsers:
When the user closes the browser, and comes back again, he will be able to access everything easily without loading it again and will be able to see things as he left it.

  • You will be able to store user preferences without keeping that data on your server.
  • It is much faster as well as secure.
  • Its storage limit is at least 5MB.
  • The data will never transfer to the server.

Previously, storing local data wasn’t such fun. Thus, HTML5 web storage is much better than cookies. And we at ZealousWeb are using HTML5 local storage feature, and in the recent project named ‘Garden Style’ we have implemented this feature. This project is of US government and the garden is based on the place named ‘San Antonio’ where there is water scarcity and they still want to plant the trees but with the least use of water.

This website will help the user to choose the garden structure (with the help of canvas feature), they can drag and drop their choice of plants of different sizes onto the canvas they already chose (with the help of drag and drop feature). Let us see both the features in detail:

To draw graphics, an element named HTML5 canvas is used on a web page. And to draw the graphics you must use JavaScript. Canvas will help you to draw circles, paths, text, boxes as well as can add images. By default, it has no content and no border; and it is just a rectangular area on an HTML page.

Browser support for canvas element- Internet Explorer 9+, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and Safari. And Internet Explorer 8 and earlier versions, do not support the this element.

Drag and Drop feature in HTML5 is actually a very common feature, but a very useful one. With the help of this, you will be able to drag any element onto the canvas.

Browser Support for drag and drop feature- Internet Explorer 9+, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and Safari. It does not work in Safari 5.1.2.

Thanks to local storage, with which browsers do remember what we type, even after the browser is refreshed or closed. It stores the data with no expiration date and will be available every time (the next day, week or year and data will not be deleted even when the browser is closed).