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Friday, August 26, 2005

AJAX: Internet Explorer Has Native Support for Persistence?!?!

How the heck did I miss the existence of non-cookie persistence features in Internet Explorer since IE 5? This is from MSDN:

"Persistence enables authors to specify an object to persist on the client during the current and later sessions using Dynamic HTML (DHTML) behaviors. Persistence allows Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 and later to retain Web page information, styles, variables, and state. For example, a collapsible list of links within a table of contents can remain expanded to the user's choice upon leaving and later returning to the page. Or, a search engine query form can retain the last-used search string.

Persistence is implemented as a behavior. The new persistence behaviors include:

  • saveFavorite - persists page state and information when the web page is saved as a favorite.
  • saveHistory - persists page state and information within the current session's memory.
  • saveSnapshot - persists page state and information directly in the page when users save the Web page to their hard disk.
  • userData - persists page state and information within an Extensible Markup Language (XML) store, a hierarchical data structure."
Man, I'll have to mess around with this to see if it actually works and what the parameters are. I also need to look over all of the default behaviors that are available.

Check out this page, for example, which shows a demo for Internet Explorer that loads and saves permanent data into some kind of XML data store for web pages. This is crazy, and much better for storing permanent state, for Internet Explorer at least, then techniques I discovered this week.

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