11.7. Favorite Twitter Searches: HTML5 Web Storage

Before HTML5, websites could store only small amounts of text-based information on a user’s computer using cookies. A cookie is a key/value pair in which each key has a corresponding value. The key and value are both strings. Cookies are stored by the browser on the user’s computer to maintain client-specific information during and between browser sessions. A website might use a cookie to record user preferences or other information that it can retrieve during the client’s subsequent visits. For example, a website can retrieve the user’s name from a cookie and use it to display a personalized greeting. Similarly, many websites used cookies during a browsing session to track user-specific information, such as the contents of an online shopping cart.