When web developers think of storing anything about the user, they immediately think of uploading to the server. HTML5 changes that, as there are now several technologies allowing the app to save data on the client device. It might also be sync'd back to the server, or it might only ever stay on the client:
There are several reasons to use client-side storage. First, we can make your app work when the user is offline, possibly sync'ing data back once the network is connected again. Second, it's a performance booster; you can show a large corpus of data as soon as the user clicks on to your site, instead of waiting for it to download again. Third, it's an easier programming model, with no server infrastructure required. Of course, the data is more vulnerable and the user can't access it from multiple clients, so you should only use it for non-critical data, in particular cached versions of data that's also "in the cloud".
