Chapter 6: Maintaining User Preferences

Overview

A useful feature of many Web sites is that they remember your preferences that is, the site stores information about you such as your name, a particular color scheme you ve chosen, or specific content you want displayed on the page. When you visit the site again, it knows what choices you made before and displays pages accordingly.

To see one example of this type of preferences page, visit http://www.msn.com/. One of the tabs at the top of the page is called My MSN. On that tab you can find the links named Change Content, Change Layout, and Change Color, which are used to save your preferences.

In this chapter, you ll create a modest version of a preferences page that builds on the slideshow page from Chapter 5. The preferences page in this chapter is very simple. It allows the user to set preferences for a single user interface element, namely the captions in the slideshow. Obviously, that s a lot of effort for just one element. In a real application, you would obtain many more preferences, and you would apply those preferences to many more user interface elements, such as the color scheme, layout, and even the content of a page. Once you understand the principles described in the preferences page from this chapter, you can create much more elaborate pages and apply the preferences much more broadly.