What is store in Local Storage used for in Chrome?

While backing up my google chrome User Data folder, I was looking at some of the files in the Local Storage folder, they all seem to have a website URL as part of the name, and they start out with SQLite format 3 on the first line.

I wasn't aware that chrome used SQLite 3 to store anything, but I am curious, is this something that each site is setting to store in local storage or is it something that google just does on it's own?

The folder I am talking about on a Windows 7 install is @

"C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Local Storage"

The Local Storage and the SQLite are there to provide the proposed (W3C) Web Storage, and Web SQL Database, originally intended for the HTML5 spec.

From Wikipedia:

Web Storage and DOM Storage (Document Object Model) are web application software methods and protocols used for storing data in a web browser. Web storage supports persistent data storage, similar to cookies, as well as window-local storage.

Web storage offers two different storage areas—local storage and session storage—which differ in scope and lifetime. Data placed in local storage is per domain (it's available to all scripts from the domain that originally stored the data) and persists after the browser is closed.

.

Web SQL Database is a web page API for storing data in databases that can be queried using a variant of SQL.

The API is supported by Google Chrome, Opera and Safari, but will not be implemented by Mozilla Firefox which instead supports the Indexed Database API.

The W3C Web Applications Working Group ceased working on the specification in November 2010, citing lack of independent implementations (not using SQLite as the backend) as the reason the specification could not move forward to become a W3C Recommendation.