Local Storage, Session storage, Web storage, web database and cookies in HTML5

Question

What is the difference between these concepts, and when should I use one in particular? Does this listing also contain different names for the same general concept?

Answer 1

HTML5 web storage is a generic umbrella term for the new client-side data storage options.

Local Storage is persistent and scoped to the domain. At the moment two flavors are usually mentioned:

• 'default': stores things in name/value pairs
• Web SQL (aka Web Database): uses an SQL database

Session Storage is non persistent and scoped only to the current window.

Cookies are the old school way of doing all of the above. Stores name/value pairs per domain.